Jo's research examines how leisure, markets, digital platforms, and technologies intersect with social harm in everyday life. Her work spans both illicit and licit economies, with a particular focus consumer, digital, and leisure environments.

Her early research on fashion counterfeiting, and subsequent collaborations on the financial trade in counterfeit markets, demonstrated the importance of analysing illicit markets in relation to the legitimate industries and cultural practices that structure them. This foundational insight continues to inform her current work, which examines how digital platforms, influencer cultures, and the creator economy shape contemporary forms of knowledge, value, and participation. This relates to a broader interest in hidden employment harms within consumer and leisure industries – recently examined through a study of ‘betting shop’ employees.

Across areas including social media influencers, online advice and expertise, consumers, and gambling environments, her research explores how platform logics, commercial pressures, and technological interventions reshape everyday harms and redistribute responsibility. She is particularly concerned with moving beyond individualised explanations of harm, such as consumer responsibility, ‘responsible gambling’, or misinformation, to show how harms are produced, normalised, and often hidden within everyday practices.

Her work has clear policy relevance, particularly in challenging the limitations of behaviour-focused regulatory approaches. By demonstrating how harms are structured by market dynamics, platform architectures, and regulatory and technological systems, her research contributes to the development of more holistic and system-aware policy responses to contemporary social problems.
see: research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/joanna-large