Gillian Youngs

Professor Gillian Youngs

Visiting Professor of Design & Digital Strategy

Key details

Professor Gillian Youngs

Visiting Professor of Design & Digital Strategy

Professor Gillian Youngs is Visiting Professor of Design and Digital Strategy in the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Greenwich.

Artificial intelligence (AI) innovations have launched a new era of policy and public engagement with the workings of digital economy and the scale of its possibilities and risks. Gillian’s new book Feminist International Relations Through a Technospatial Lens to be published by Routledge in 2025 presents new analysis supported by a range of material related to more than a quarter of a century of her applied research and practice on power and empowerment in the digital world. Its technosocial approach reflects her interdisciplinary focus across digital economy, globalization and feminist international relations.

The volume continues Gillian’s attention to digital and virtual futures and is informed by her long-term research and policy-related contributions on innovation and digital and creative economy. Her project work with entrepreneurs and innovators in the start-up ecosystem is featured in the 76-page report The FUSE at Ten: Reviewing a Decade of Research Impact launched at the House of Lords in May 2023. In 2020 Gillian became a Fellow of the Women’s Engineering Society in recognition of her outstanding contribution to digital economy and sustained support of women in STEM.

Gillian has a leadership background in media, entrepreneurial business and higher education and her international experience and project work in Europe, the USA, Africa and East Asia, provide her with cross-cultural perspectives, which inform all aspects of her work.

After successfully establishing one of the first MA programmes related to the internet, she believes she was the first woman in the UK to be appointed as a Professor of Digital Economy in 2010. She has been a principal investigator on funding awards from the ESRC, AHRC and British Academy, and she was Inaugural John Urry Fellow, University of Lancaster (2017 – 2018).

Gillian has published widely in her areas of expertise, and co-edited one of the first critical editions on globalization which was published in three editions – Globalization: Theory and Practice, Continuum, 1996, 2003, 2008. A revised version of her PhD thesis was published as International Relations in a Global Age, Polity, 1999. She edited Political Economy, Power and the Body: Global Perspectives, Macmillan, 2000, and Digital World: Connectivity, Creativity and Rights, Routledge, 2013. Her second monograph, Global Political Economy in the Information Age, was published by Routledge in 2007. She was a founding co-editor of International Feminist Journal of Politics in 1999 and continues to serve on its International Advisory Council.

Gillian led a project which contributed to the agenda for establishing Innovate UK’s Digital Catapult and was Academic Lead for the establishment of the Digital Catapult Brighton. Her research has been included in all RCUK/UKRI Research Assessment Exercises and Research Excellence Framework submissions including as part of impact, and she was a member of the RCUK Research Excellence Framework 2014 Sub-panel 36: Communication, Cultural and Media Studies, Library and Information Management.

Gillian served as a high-level expert on innovation at the European Commission (2016 - 2021) to the Horizon 2020 Protection and Security Group (Vice-Chair), and as an expert on the Advisory Group for Gender (2016–2018). She was an external member of the BFI Screen IndustryResearch and Statistics Advisory Group (2015 – 2021). Other strategic and advocacy roles and contributions have ranged across Welsh Government, RCUK (now UKRI), Arts Council, Nesta, Creative Industries Federation (CIF), Council for Higher Education in Art and Design (CHEAD), SME business networks and start-up communities.