Dr. Dana Kaplan is a senior lecturer at the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication and in the MA Program in Cultural Studies. A cultural sociologist, Dana investigates the relationships between class-making processes under neoliberal capitalism, value regimes, and aesthetic judgments in everyday life. She is specifically interested in middle class cultures, lifestyles, practices of embodiment, and most significantly – sex and sexuality. Her recent studies focus on middle-class heterosexual relations; the media's role in introducing new classed ideals of creativity and self-realization through the concept of sexual freedom; and the connections between sexual experimentalism and employability. Her research on facial beauty and social class was financed by the Israel Science Foundation. Her book
What is Sexual Capital?, co-authored with Eva Illouz, was published in 2022 by Polity Press and translated to several languages.
Dana is currently working on several digital sociology research projects, including digital sexual story-telling and the platformization of recreational sexuality; digital self-documentation and life in persistent poverty; and a pilot study on implementing AI tools for a gender-based longitudinal paralinguistic microanalysis of an audiovisual archive.