Blurred boundaries: An exploration of university students’ digital intimacies in hybrid ecologies.

Tyrrell, Katie (2025) Blurred boundaries: An exploration of university students’ digital intimacies in hybrid ecologies. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis explores the critical intersection of digital technologies and intimate relationships amongst university students. By providing a nuanced investigation of how students navigate intimacy, trust, and abuse in the digital age, this study contributes valuable empirical insights which are of relevance during a sector-wide policy shift in England, as universities move toward regulatory requirements to address harassment and sexual misconduct (OfS, 2024a). Although universities are nationally recognised as agents of social change, with students moving beyond traditional learners to citizens and future leaders (Humphreys & Towl, 2022), research exploring UK university students’ experiences and perceptions of healthy and harmful online relational practices is limited.

Grounded in voices of twenty students, collected via focus groups, and supplemented by follow-up interviews, the findings of this thesis highlight the need to recognise the changing space and time dimensions of students’ university experience afforded by technologies. The use of online platforms during the transition to and throughout university is pivotal to student experience, providing opportunities to connect with near and distant others, although accompanied by risks and extended university boundaries. For the students, such risks are a necessary component of digital intimacies, and foundational to trust. However, online platforms serve dual and often contradictory functions in students’ digital intimacies, with blurred boundaries between practices constructed as intimacy or abuse. Together, the findings highlight the necessity of reconceptualising students as existing within hybrid ecologies, moving toward risk mitigation and harm reduction approaches to online safeguarding in universities as opposed to risk elimination, and recognising wider forms of online abuse across the university sector. The thesis concludes by emphasising the need to move toward supportive multi-stakeholder responses to online abuse (Phippen & Bond, 2022a), which recognise the complexities of digital interactions and their profound impact on the intimate lives of university students.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Psychology
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	09 Apr 2026 10:33
Last Modified:	09 Apr 2026 10:33
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/102722
DOI:

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