About

Welcome to Blogger On Pole, a.k.a. Dr. Carolina Are’s corner of the Internet, covering pole dance, fitness, lifestyle, wellbeing, tech research, activism and writing. All in one blog. Wild, right?

Who is Blogger On Pole?

This is an About page so it’s all about me. YAY. You’ve clicked through so now you’ve got to read it.

I’m Dr Carolina Are and I’m an Italian Londoner, dual Italian/British citizen, bisexual pole dancing academic, a performer, semi-retired instructor, writer, survivor, blogger.

I’m a digital criminologist focusing on the intersection of online harms and freedom of speech, with an emphasis on digital rights in the observation of social media platform governance, artificial intelligence, online abuse and conspiracy theories. My work has been published in high-impact journals such as New Media & Society, Social Media + Society, Information, Communications & Society and Feminist Media Studies, and funded by high-profile research funders, non-profit organisations and UN agencies – see here. It has resulted in several citations, in engagement with public consultations for Ofcom, the UK Government’s Department for Science, Communications and Technology and many more, as well as in consulting for Big Tech and national and international civil society organisations.

I was an activist and pole dancer before I was a full-time researcher, so the fight to improve digital users’ lived experiences has always been at the centre of my work, social media content, engagement with different stakeholders and of my writing as a blogger and freelance writer. It’s this work that won me the Activist of the Year 2019 award at the Sexual Freedom Awards (which means I now own a gold flying penis that I can stroke at my leisure. Sue me!), for whom I am now a returning judge, as well as the Skripped Down 2023 Philantropist of the Year Award.

As the researcher, activist and content creator behind the @bloggeronpole social media accounts and blog, and as a former public relations professional turned platform governance expert, I use this blog to raise awareness about the issues social media users face, from safety to censorship of marginalised communities, but also to share bits about my life, from travel to reviews, from essays to interviews and critiques. Thanks to my combined social media following of over 400,000 and to features in The Guardian, The New York Times, the BBC and Wired, I am a known expert in the field of digital culture, content moderation and online safety amongst colleagues and civil society alike.

Originally from sunny Sardinia, I left my hometown of Olbia at 18 to study journalism in London. I have been actively blogging since 2011, at first while gaining a degree in journalism and then through to working in PR and freelancing in journalism and social media consulting.

Looking for a change of direction, I moved to Australia for a Criminology MA at the University of Sydney. I am now back to the Big Smoke as a pole dancing academic, but closer to my favourite places: London and Italy. It is here that I got a PhD in digital criminology, focusing on online abuse and conspiracy theories in social media conversations surrounding high-profile criminal cases. Although my expertise is still largely in online harms, I pivoted to focus more on digital censorship in 2019, when Instagram started shadowbanning pole dancers and I secured an official apology about it through this blog (of course they still censor us, but that apology was their first big admission of wrongdoing, and I bet they rue the day they started speaking to me). It was around that time that I realised that publishing research about the toxic subcultures I was observing would have gotten me trolled for life, and since helping communities I was part of seemed more impactful to me than… you know… getting harassed, I’ve become somewhat of a player in the fight for better social media content moderation.

This has resulted in the creation of or involvement with several campaigns (e.g., the Dita Von Teese-backed #Everybodyvisible), petitions, protests and in direct engagement with platforms (Meta in particular), who used to help me expedite reviews to restore accounts they had wrongly deleted, but who are now increasingly becoming an unreliable contact.

So I guess you could say I’m quite an unconventional academic, in that I blend research, consulting, advocacy and public speaking with content creation, ass-shaking and nudity, an approach informed by my love for an art and a sport that was created and popularised by strippers and sex workers, and that I have been engaging in since 2016.

WTF is Blogger On Pole?

This blog was born in 2017, when I rebranded my old travel blog into a more pole-centric site. And while Blogger On Pole was initially just a space to showcase my passions – food, travel, events, fitness and pole dance – it soon morphed into much more. It became sort of a job, a platform to share my activism and to geek out about my academic research too. Because I’m all about the interdisciplinary vibes.

Since then, I’ve worked with brands ranging from fashion company Lucy & Yak to lingerie brand Mariemur, from iconic polewear company Pole Junkie all the way to Modibodi period underwear (find out about how to work with me here). So this is a space for me to be my old awks self, talk about all the food I end up eating, my random holidays, all the mindfucks I end up having and about my life as a pole dancer… just to show you that people can be versatile, and that shaking your ass in a headstand doesn’t mean you can’t do research on online harms. ‘Cause I can. #getyouagirlwhocandoboth (or everything, and get a panic attack in the meantime).

My research

Since finishing my PhD in 2021, I’ve somewhat successfully blended my research and pole dancing personae, using this blog and my social media to increase my research’s impact. I did so through slowly drip feeding these joint identities, then revealed through a Twitter thread (RIP, see below) that influenced my expression, and was ultimately narrated in a chapter for a book published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This doesn’t mean I don’t panic about doing both, but doing so makes for interesting reflections.

I am now working at the London School of Economics and Political Science after over three years as an Innovation Fellow at Northumbria University’s Centre for Digital Citizens. 

I have published some of the first studies on shadowbanning, and I’ve definitely been the first to publish research on the shadowbanning of pole dance. 

At the LSE, I teach several themes straddling social science and technology, while working on research projects at the intersection between online harms and censorship.

You can find all my research here.

Pole Dancing

I started dancing at the amazing place that is Sydney Pole in 2016, at a really low point in my life. Having just left all I knew to move to Australia, I was coming from a break-up, an abusive relationship and years of unresolved and accumulated anxiety, depression and PTSD. Pole pretty much changed my life giving me my body and my head back, together with strength and a purpose. Sometimes showing your butt is just the way forward, right?

Since then, I have performed and taught nationally and internationally from the UK to Canada, from Italy to the US. I have become an ambassador or model for several pole and lingerie brands, and I have spent years creating pole dance content (and being censored for it of course). More info about me and pole on this page and on the whole blog lol – more info about how you can hire me as a performer, judge or instructor here.

But wait a minute: who is this chick? Why does she sound familiar? No, I haven’t done any sex tapes (yet). I did however create (and write for) a bunch of other blogs. Here they are.

London’s Calling – Londra Chiama

I’ve stopped paying for this blog so all you can find is its Twitter account, which I’ve left to show that the blog can’t come to the phone: Why? BECAUSE IT’S DEAD.

London’s Calling – Londra Chiama started right before the beginning of my journalism degree here in London. When I saw all my fellow classmates had done some work experience at a newspaper, radio, TV station and the like, I realised I had done fuck all and pretty much panicked. So I came up with the blog, which begun as a step-by-step guide to help Italians apply to university in London – and, I’ve recently found out, was responsible for most of the Italian population enrolling into my uni’s degree (#humblebrag) – and slowly morphed into a lifestyle blog.

I got sick of just writing in Italian so I then set up Couchsurfer Reviews.

Couchsurfer Reviews

In 2014 I completed my mission: surviving – and most of all enjoying – my first-ever Couchsurfing trip across the United States of America. The foundations of blog started then, during a trip was my last chance for an adventure before I became a real person with a real job. Since working in social media scarred me for life, I decided to remember my journey across America in full 21st Century style: through Internet over-sharing. Which was incidentally a viable tracking system in case I ended up in the next Ted Bundy’s hands.

Couchsurfer Reviews has now however fully re-branded and morphed into Blogger On Pole. When you Google couchsurferreviews.com, this blog will come up. The oldest posts will be very lo-fi because I posted them from my old iPhone 4 while travelling across America, and that’s ok. Tryna to be real here, and to keep a log of my (Internet) history.

Why the rebrand? Because of my anxiety and depression I have struggled to continue being a Couchsurfing host or to Couchsurf when I travel. Even though Couchsurfing pretty much saved me from a really dark place I was in when I went to the US, in my crazy busy, slashie life in London I often need time to breathe, be alone and switch everything off – including my social skills. Hence, I felt like calling this blog Couchsurfer Reviews wasn’t accurate or fair, and I’ve changed it to unify it under my Insta name and my life.

My Writing Elsewhere

I have written in a freelance and blogging capacity for several outlets, from TimeOut Sydney to more personal or academic writing.

In the mid-2010s I used to blog for The Huffington Post UK, where I had a profile I used to ramble on about food, my twisted political views or my entertainment obsessions. For the Huff Post, I either went on a long tirade about something or wrote in a list format (I had a profile on the Huff Post UK blog, which meant that before they stopped having contributors I could write a blog post there and the team approves it or not and I was not a paid member of staff in the Huff Post Newsroom).

For example, you can find:

• My travel and food guides for BoE (The Business of Everything) magazine
• My slightly more academic opinion / research pieces in The Conversation
• My travel and food guides for Hip & Healthy
• My Restaurant reviews for Broadsheet Sydney.

But overall, unless I’m paid enough for it, I now prefer writing things here to take advantage of my own blog as a personal space, or to give media interviews to share my thoughts on specific topics – find Me In The Media here. I also have a newsletter, for which you can sign up here.

If by now you haven’t been able to tell: I’m very online, and as a millennial, I’ve been around (meaning, all over the Internet) – and that’s why this blog, blending everything from online subcultures such as pole to Internet research, is the way it is. We are the weirdos, mister.