Lisa Sugiura

Who she is

Lisa Sugiura is Professor of Cybercrime and Gender in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Portsmouth. She came to the subject through an unusual route: a law degree, master's degrees in criminology and in web science, and a PhD in Web Science from the University of Southampton in 2016. She joined Portsmouth in 2015, was promoted to Reader in 2022 and to Professor in 2025, and her research covers online gender-based violence, the manosphere and incels, and technology-facilitated domestic abuse. She is a Fellow of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism and vice-chair of the independent advisory group for Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary. ^[1]

That last detail signals what makes her distinctive among the researchers covered on this site: she works at the boundary where manosphere research meets policing and criminal-justice practice in the UK.

The Incel Rebellion

Her 2021 book, The Incel Rebellion: The Rise of the Manosphere and the Virtual War Against Women, published by Emerald, was one of the first book-length academic studies of the incel movement. The publisher describes it as an account of the manosphere's development and of how far incel influence and philosophy are penetrating mainstream culture, built on ethnographic research and interviews, with chapters on the manosphere's emergence, its recruitment strategies, the contested question of whether incels constitute extremism, and how misogyny is legitimised. ^{[2] [5]}

The method matters. Rather than relying only on scraped posts, the book draws on ethnographic research and interviews, and her wider body of work is built on qualitative methods, forum analysis and interviews, an approach that connects individual biographies to the ideology rather than treating the community as an undifferentiated bloc. ^{[2] [3]}

Tracking the ideology onto mainstream platforms

Her subsequent research followed incel ideology out of its dedicated forums. In a 2023 study with Anda Iulia Solea, she analysed two incel-focused TikTok accounts, 52 videos and 1,657 comments, and found that incel ideology takes covert forms on mainstream platforms, using emotional appeals and pseudo-scientific framing to spread incelosphere tropes while staying under moderation thresholds, with comment sections normalising ideas such as lookism and male-victimhood narratives. ^[4] The finding parallels, from a criminological direction, what Debbie Ging's algorithm audits found experimentally: the ideas travel well beyond the forums that coined them.

Her current projects continue in that vein. The Portsmouth research portal records over a decade of work on online gender-based violence using forum analysis and interviews, Home Office-funded research on computer misuse as a facilitator of domestic abuse, and the ESRC-funded project "Unmaking Incels: Addressing Incel Radicalisation" (2025-2026). She has published four books, including the co-edited Palgrave Handbook of Gendered Violence and Technology, provides expert commentary to outlets including the BBC and The Guardian, and is an Associate Editor of Criminology and Criminal Justice. ^[3]

Where she stands in the debate

Sugiura frames incel harm as gendered violence and studies it with a criminologist's toolkit, which places her interpretively closer to Laura Bates's extremism framing than to the mental-health-first reading advanced by William Costello, though her interview-based method shares his insistence on engaging incels as people rather than caricatures. Her book's own chapters treat "incels as extremism" as a question to be examined rather than a premise, and her funded work on incel radicalisation and de-radicalisation makes her one of the UK researchers most directly involved in what, practically, should be done. This site cites her ethnographic findings alongside the survey literature and notes where the two traditions read the same communities differently.