About

I am from New Zealand and have been living in the United Kingdom since 2013.

I am currently an Associate Professor of Information Systems in Norwich Business School at the University of East Anglia (UEA), United Kingdom. I joined UEA as a lecturer in 2016 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2020.

I completed my PhD in Information Systems in 2013 from the University of Auckland, New Zealand on the topic of social movements in virtual worlds. I explored how social movements can use virtual worlds to raise awareness for their causes and how the social movements must evolve their practices as the technology evolves. Some publications based on the work from my PhD:

McKenna, B., & Chughtai, H. (2020). Resistance and sexuality in virtual worlds: An LGBT perspective. Computers in Human Behavior, 105, 106199.

McKenna, B. (2020). Creating convivial affordances: A study of virtual world social movements. Information Systems Journal, 30(1), 185-214.

McKenna, B., Myers, M. D., & Newman, M. (2017). Social media in qualitative research: Challenges and recommendations. Information and Organization, 27(2), 87-99.

I completed my Masters degree in 2009 from the University of Auckland. I wrote my masters thesis about how consumers use location-based services. Some publications based on the work from my Masters degree are:

McKenna, B., Tuunanen, T., & Gardner, L. (2013). Consumers’ adoption of information services. Information & Management, 50(5), 248-257.

McKenna, B., Tuunanen, T., & Gardner, L. A. (2014). Exploration of location-based services adoption. International Journal of E-Services and Mobile Applications (IJESMA), 6(1), 1-22.

I also have a Bachelor of Arts in Geography and a Bachelor of Commerce in Information Systems. Both of which were completed in 2008 at the University of Auckland.