Tanja Dreher | Co-Director

Tanja Dreher is Associate Professor in Media and Co-Director of the Media Futures Hub at the University of New South Wales. Her work builds social justice and data justice interventions in media scholarship and practice. Tanja’s research foregrounds the politics of listening as a route to more just futures and solidarities against settler colonialism and structural violence. As a CI on the project Breaking Silences: media and the child abuse royal commission, Tanja led research on the impact of news values and media logics that entrench hierarchies of attention and obscure ongoing systemic injustice. In collaboration with Dr Poppy de Souza, she explores the potential for sovereign and self-determined voice in community and alternative media

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/tanja-dreher Web: tanjadreher.net Twitter: @TanjaDreher
Facebook: ListeningforMediaJustice

#listening #socialjustice #mediaactivism #datajustice #firstnationsmedia

Michael Richardson | Co-Director

Michael Richardson is a an Associate Professor at UNSW Sydney and an Associate Investigator with ADM+S. His research examines how technology, power, and culture shape knowledge in war, security, and surveillance. His latest book is Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Climate, and Data After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2024).

UNSW: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/associate-professor-michael-richardson Twitter: @richardson_m_a

#witnessing #violence #affect #drones #syntheticmedia

Elaine Jing Zhao | CO-director

Dr Elaine Jing Zhao is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Elaine’s broad research interest lies in cultural production, industry transformations and governance challenges in digital media economy. Her work addresses the social, cultural and economic implications of digital technologies and platforms in transitional China and beyond borders. She has published extensively on media and cultural policy, cultural production, creative labour, and informal media economy in a context increasingly mediated by platforms, algorithms, data.

UNSW: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/elaine-jing-zhao Twitter: @elainezj                       

#platforms #labour #governance #informality #china

Andrew Brooks | CO-DIRECTOR

Dr Andrew Brooks is a Lecturer in Media Cultures in the School of Arts & Media, UNSW. His work investigates policing and abolition, technology and social movements, race and anti-racism, infrastructure and inequalities. His current projects include: a study of political economy and aesthetics of social upheavals – such as riots and blockades – that respond to state violence; an examination of police power and abolitionist movements in the settler-colony of Australia read through contemporary art; and consideration of the impacts of automated crowd control technologies on the protest.

UNSW: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/andrew-brooks Web: www.snacksyndicate.net

#anti-racism #historical materialism #mediation #state violence #sound and noise

Adam Fish

Adam Fish is an Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. He is a cultural anthropologist, documentary video producer, and interdisciplinary scholar who works across social science, computer engineering, environmental science, and the visual arts. Dr. Fish employs ethnographic, participatory, and creative methods to examine the social, political, and ecological impacts of new technologies. His current project focuses on how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and other First Nations communities are involved in renewable energy industries.

UNSW: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/adam-fish Academia.edu: https://unsw.academia.edu/AdamFish YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCokOGJT280mnHvREwCQyqhw

#environment #networks #planetary #energy #philosophy

Ramaswami Harindranath

Ramaswami Harindranath is Professor or Media at UNSW. Hari’s research interests include global media cultures and economies; race, class and marginalisation; digital technologies and socio-political change; postcoloniality and decoloniality; mobility, multiculturalism and citizenship; South Asian cultural politics; and transnational cultural formations. He is currently working on a book tentatively entitled Southern Discomfort that examines diverse aspects that constitute the Global South.

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/ramaswami-harindranath ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ramaswami-Harindranath                                   

#coloniality #raceandclass #globalsouth #digitaldocumentary #mobility

SUKHMANI KHORANA

Sukhmani Khorana is a Scientia Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW. She is the external co-lead of the ‘Migration, Im/mobility and Belonging’ research theme at Sydney Centre for Healthy Societies, the University of Sydney. Sukhmani has published extensively on refugee and migrant media, food in multicultural contexts, and the politics of mediated emotions. She is the lead CI on a new ARC Linkage project on generating place-based belonging for migrant women, and has a forthcoming co-authored book, 'Migrants, Television and Australian Stories: A New History' (2025).

UNSW: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-sukhmani-khorana
Twitter: @sukhmani_sees
Web: https://www.sukhmanikhorana.com/

#migration #affect #screenmedia #decolonial #foodcultures

Emma A. Jane

Dr Emma A. Jane is a Senior Lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW Sydney. She researches the social and ethical implications of emerging technologies using futures and transdisciplinary methods to propose interventions. Having previously led a major study on gendered cyberhate, her current projects include a study of radicalized misogyny and research into the future of sex and gender. Prior to her career in academia, Emma spent nearly 25 years working in the print, broadcast, and electronic media during which time she won multiple awards for her writing and investigative reporting.                  

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/emma-jane Web: emmajane.info     

#emergingtechnologies #futures #cyberhate #gender #sex

Tara McLennan

Dr Tara McLennan is a lecturer and Nexus fellow in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales. She explores how networked smartphone photography mediates personal memory and the experience of the present. Her research interests include new media studies, philosophies of photography, film studies and memory studies, which she pursues via creative research practices such as autoethnography, experimental histories and fictocriticism. Tara has an emerging interest in affective sites of encounter between artificial intelligence, vernacular photographs and platform users.

UNSW: https://www.unsw.edu.au/staff/tara-mclennan Academia.edu: https://unsw.academia.edu/TaraMcLennan

#photography #memory #affect #autoethnography #socialmedia

anna munster

Anna Munster is a Professor in Art and Design and Deputy Director of The National Institute for Experimental Arts (NIEA) at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. She is lead CI on an ARC Discovery Project that examines visual cultures and machine learning, and partners with media and science studies scholars on projects addressing the politics and aesthetics of machine learning, more-than-human perception, new pragmatist approaches to media and art, new media art environments and ecologies; and time, movement and sonicity. Anna is also a media artist who collaborates with Michele Barker developing multi-channel audiovisual environments exploring the relations between perception, movement and media.

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/anna-munster Web: sensesofperception.info Instagram: sensesofperception

#statisticalvisuality, #visualculturesofmachinelearning, #embodiedperception, #immediation, #affect

POPPY DE SOUZA

Poppy’s research is concerned with the politics of voice and listening—broadly defined—in conditions of inequality and injustice across a range of contexts.  Her work is informed by critical theory and cultural studies, critical media studies, and by feminist, de/anti-colonial and intersectional approaches, and is firmly interdisciplinary.  Poppy’s research interests include critical theories of voice and voice poverty; political listening and media justice; sound, race and the cultural politics of listening; borders, boundaries, frontiers and thresholds; and sensory, sonic and slow methodologies.  She is currently Bridging Hope Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Big Anxiety Research Centre, UNSW Sydney, and an Adjunct with the Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. 

Web: poppydesouza.com

#voice #listening #mediajustice #race

Mary Zournazi  

Mary Zournazi is an Australian author, philosopher and filmmaker. She is the director of the multi-award winning documentary Dogs of Democracy (2017) and the author of several books including Foreign Dialogues, Keywords to War, Hope - New philosophies for change and Inventing Peace with the German filmmaker Wim Wenders. She is the co-author of the play Solomon’s Dream with Christos Tsiolkas. Mary has worked extensively with writing and producing radio documentaries for ABC Radio National. She is Associate Professor and Chair of the sociology program at the University of New South Wales, Australia. Currently she is working on her new documentary film called MY Rembetika Blues.

She is interested in visual ethnography and the sociology of images.

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/mary-zournazi Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/ondemand/dogsofdemocracy

#visualethnography #documentaryfilm #emotion #nonviolence #peace

JODI BROOKS

Dr Jodi Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the School of Arts & Media. Jodi's research is interested in the shifting sites, forms, meanings, and uses of cinema. This interest underlies and connects her research (and teaching) across various areas of film and screen culture, including her current work on aging in, on, and with cinema; aesthetics of access in screen culture; cine-feminisms and feminist film theory; and independent cinema.

UNSW: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-jodi-brooks

#cinema #film theory #cine-feminisms #aesthetics of access #ageing & screen culture

charu mathani

Charu Maithani is a researcher who organises her inquiries in the form of writing and curated projects. Her research articulates conditions of mediality, aesthetic and political relations of/by media objects, material-discursive practices that persist racialized media operations by thinking and working across media studies, media ecologies, digital art and cinema. She is interested in exploring the perceptual and epistemological changes in contemporary media culture facilitated by AI and relationship between data practices and dominant ideological arrangement of vision.

Website: https://www.charumaithani.net

UNSW: https://research.unsw.edu.au/people/dr-charu-maithani

THOMAS SMITH

Thomas Smith is a Sydney based artist, musician, educator and researcher. His practice combines performance, video, electronic music, speculative fiction, websites, curatorial projects and critical writing. Thomas’ work is concerned with the social effects of computational systems, the politics of creative economies, emerging digital subjectivities and electronic music as a mode critical and aesthetic inquiry. Thomas is performs and releases music as T.Morimoto, is a member of the Trackwork record label collective,  and runs independent record label Sumactrac with Jarred Beeler (DJ Plead) and Jon Watts.

Thomas’ works have been exhibited and/or performed at institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney), Sarai CSDS (Delhi), Unsound Festival (Poland), Fondation Fiminco (Paris), Serendipity Arts Festival (Goa), Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (Melbourne), ADM+S Annual Symposium (Melbourne), Biennale of Sydney 2022, National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne), Central Academy of Fine Arts (Beijing), Nasjonalmuseet (Oslo), Floating Projects (Hong Kong), Avantwhatever Festival (Melbourne), Goldsmiths College (London), Firstdraft Gallery (Sydney), Queensland University Art Museum (Brisbane), Alaska Projects (Sydney) and Blindside Gallery (Melbourne). Thomas’ writing has been published in Realtime Magazine, Runway Journal, Un Magazine and Chicago based Plates Journal.

http://t-morimoto.com/

Ayesha Jehangir

Dr. Ayesha Jehangir is a Lecturer in Journalism and Communication at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Her research focuses on the mediation of human suffering from war and conflict zones. Particularly, she studies peace journalism, the refugee voice, digital political participation and self-determination. Ayesha has an emerging interest in journalism innovations in the context of cross-border collaborations, exile/displacement, and resistance. She is the author of Afghan Refugees, Pakistani Media and the State: The Missing Peace (Routledge, 2024); inaugural Peace Fellow of the International Association of Media and Communication Research (2024-2026), and a 2024 Weizenbaum Institute Open Fellow (Berlin).

Twitter/X: @zubaan_daraz
Web: https://ayeshajehangir.net/

#peacejournalism #warandconflict #refugeevoice #socialjustice #witnessing 

Madiha Neelam

Dr. Madiha Neelam is a Postdoc Research Associate in the School of Arts and Media at UNSW. She is also an academic in applied linguistics and English language teaching. Her research interests lie in raciolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, media discourse, multilingualism, migration and social justice. Committed to promoting equity, she actively explores the ways language practices and language ideologies can reflect and challenge social hierarchies, advocating for more inclusive and just approaches to language policy and pedagogy.

Twitter: https://x.com/seeing_accents/
Email: m.neelam@unsw.edu.au

#hearing #faces #seeing #accents

KYLA ALLISON

Kyla Allison is a PhD Candidate at the University of New South Wales with interests in Media and Cultural Studies. Her current research focuses on affect, media, and sexual assault, while her past research areas include video games and gaming culture.

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kyla-Allison

#affect #media #gender #violence

Madison Hichens

Madison Hichens is a current PhD Candidate at the University of New South Wales in Communication and Media Studies. Her doctoral research focuses on anxiety as a sociocultural condition of “hyper-capitalism” (Rifkin 2001), in which contemporary subjects are configured under the tenets of ‘digital anxiety’ — a governing process that drives ubiquitous digital (and social) media use. Her work is also interested in tracing ‘digital anxiety’ as it has been exploited across different platforms, and the various typologies of digital anxiety as they pertain to questions of authenticity, realness, visibility, performativity, and transparency.

UNSW: www.arts.unsw.edu.au/our-people/madison-hichens Twitter: @madisonHichens

#anxiety #socialmedia #capitalism #authenticity #visibility #performativity #transparency

Nicola Joseph   

Nicola Joseph is a Phd candidate at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. Nicola's research focuses on the ways in which media has shaped not only the way we see race and cultural difference but also the way we listen to Black, Blak, Brown, Indigenous and POC people. Nicola brings to her research over 40 years of experience in the Australian media including as a founder of Radio Skid Row-Radio Redfern in community radio, an executive producer at the ABC and as station manager at SBS radio in Sydney. She has taught media production to women in the media across Asia and the Pacific.

Facebook: www.facebook/nicola.joseph.395
Twitter: @fadwadaniens                      

#race #racism #listening #representation

Cecily Klim

Cecily Klim is an ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) funded PhD candidate at the Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW. Her research examines the digitisation and datafication of contraception; critically tracing the transformation of pregnancy prevention as it is uprooted from the medical/pharmaceutical sphere through the rise of ‘Femtech’ and ‘Sextech’. With an academic background traversing sustainable development, visual anthropology, and sociology, Cecily has a future-focused and interdisciplinary approach to her work. She is particularly interested in the techniques of representation in social research and, having worked through film, sound, storytelling, and arts workshops, she is dedicated to the use and development of creative methods.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/CecKlim

ADM+S: https://www.admscentre.org.au/cecily-klim/

Asal Mahmoodi

Asal Rashid Mahmoodi is a PhD Candidate at the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. Their doctoral research focuses on scenes of queer everyday resistance in Iran, with an additional interest in affect theory.

Bronwyn Miller

Bronwyn Miller is a PhD candidate and tutor in the School of Arts and Media, under the supervision of Assoc. Professors Tanja Dreher and Heather Ford. Their PhD research prioritises collaboration with Indigenous and/or queer peoples in ‘so-called Australia’ to examine the representation of information in AI/ML systems. Bronwyn's research foci includes the ethics of Google’s AI-driven technologies, their discursive construction, and their uneven impact among users. Bronwyn’s previous research on YouTube and video games (Miller 2023), has been presented at conferences across Europe and so-called Australia. Prior to their PhD, Bronwyn was a Senior Research Analyst at a software company in Berlin, Germany - leading a team in data management and training a NLP model.

Academia.edu: https://unsw.academia.edu/BMiller 

#ai #datajustice #LGBTQIA+ #settlercolonialism #participatoryactionresearch

Mitchell Price

Mitchell Price is research assistant at the University of New South Wales for the Media Futures Hub and Data Justice Research Network. His research interests include data infrastructures, mediation, the nonhuman, and the diagrammatic. His current research focuses on media technologies in slaughterhouses and the emerging modalities of political resistance within networked societies.

Website: https://mitchellprice.online
Instagram @mitchs.miscellanea

#diagrams #resistance #datafication #abolition

Nida Tahseen   

Nida Tahseen is a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. She is a Chevening scholar and ICFJ fellow. Nida has nine years of journalism experience and also served as an assistant professor at Forman Christian College University, in Lahore, Pakistan. Nida's research focuses on the linguistic portrayal of women in Australian contemporary print and online media. She is using appraisal resources to gauge the evaluative language of opinion pieces published through a longitudinal study design.   

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nida-Tahseen Twitter: @nida_tahseen                          

#linguistics #appraisal #genderedlanguage #australianmedia

AMIE PICKERING WATTS

Amie Pickering Watts is an Honours candidate at the University of New South Wales, Sydney Australia. Amie's research interests involve the politics of automation, smart cities and digital capitalism. Her research question focuses on the implications of algorithms shaping specific modes of existence, relations and politics. If the technical becoming of the city is inevitable, Amie's research aims to understand, how can the smart city and its communicative technologies serve as a remedy for an increasingly unstable political and social landscape.

Samantha Haran

Samantha Haran is an Eelam Tamil researcher, community organiser, writer and radio producer. She is part of the producing team at the community radio show Race Matters on FBi Radio, and her writing has been published in Vogue India, Teen Vogue and Radical Art Review. Samantha is a current Masters’ Candidate at the UNSW Faculty of Law & Justice, where she is working on a multidisciplinary research project on abolitionist and communist politics.

#leftwingpolitics #anti-capitalism #communism #abolition #culture

Gabriel Curtin

Gabriel Curtin is an artist, writer and musician living as an uninvited guest on unceded Gadigal Country. His work broadly considers poetry’s ability to locate and enact relations unencumbered by policy. He is a current PhD candidate at UNSW ADA where he teaches art history. His current research seeks to trace the production of social formations via the various cultural languages evoked by the popular iced-lolly ‘Calippo’.

#poetics #cultural studies #commodity fetish #labourandleisure

Brigid M. Costello

Dr Brigid Costello is a Senior Lecturer at UNSW, Sydney, Australia. Brigid's research focuses on playful interaction design, user experience, evaluation methods for interactive experience, and video games. Brigid also creates interactive artworks, games and designs. Her recent research explores rhythmic experience within digital environments and improvisational play within serious games.        

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/brigid-costello Academia.edu: https://unsw.academia.edu/BrigidCostello
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Brigid_Costello

#play #userexperience #rhythm #games #interactiondesign

Andrew Murphie

Andrew works across: media; technics (technologies, techniques, technical systems and modes of organisation); ecology, climate change and climate change communication; process philosophy, social theory, and affect; the politics of organisation. Specifically, “the world as medium” and/vs a "third media revolution" (AI and automation; VR, augmented and mixed reality; data and signaletics; genetics, drones and the internet of things, etc). This subsumes cultures of representation into the radical in-folding of world and media. Other projects: the wicked problem of “catastrophic multiplicities” at the intersection of radical media, environmental and social change; “against data”—questioning basic concepts of data/exploring alternative technics.

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/andrew-murphie Academis.edu: https://unsw.academia.edu/AndrewMurphie

#mediachange #artificialintelligence #climatechange #processphilosophy #deleuzeandguattari

Edgar Gómez Cruz

Edgar Gómez Cruz is a Senior Lecturer in Media (Digital Cultures) at the UNSW in Sydney. He has published widely on a number of topics relating to digital culture, digital ethnography and digital photography. His research interests span from everyday uses of digital technologies using an ethnographic approach, methodological innovation and visual interventions.

UNSW: www.ada.unsw.edu.au/our-people/edgar-gomez-cruz Academia.edu:https://optusnet.academia.edu/EdgarG%C3%B3mezCruz Web: imagenaciones.com Twitter: @Imagenaciones

#visual #methods #innovation #everyday #photography #algorithms

Kate Gwynne    

Kate Gwynne is a writer and creative practice PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. Kate's research explores narrative discourse, embodiment and affect in the context of emerging immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies. She is developing a virtual reality script experiment - a conceptual and written blueprint for a VR narrative experience - which interrogates the interrelationship between the participant as a corporeal agent and how they respond to narrative dynamics, via the sensory dimensions of immersive technology systems.     

Twitter: @kategwynne              

#embodiment #narrative #affect #virtualreality #immersion 

Danielle Hynes

Danielle Hynes is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maynooth, Ireland. Danielle is currently working on the ERC funded project Data Stories. The team are working alongside artists and various organisations who hold planning, property and housing data in order to focus critical attention on the underlying evidence base for planning and property activity. Danielle's doctoral research explored social justice in cities, the present and future of non-market housing, and how ubiquitous datafication is impacting urban life. She is particularly interested in how discourses surrounding new technology in cities are shaping urban imaginaries, and who is included and excluded within the idea/ideal of the smart city.

Web: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/people/danielle-hynes
Twitter: @dani_hynes               

#housing #socialjustice #data #imaginaries #researchcreation

Kevin Witzenberger

Kevin Witzenberger is a Scientia PhD candidate in the School of Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. His research focuses on automation and artificial intelligence in education.     

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Kevin-Witzenberger Twitter: @KevinWtz

#automation #ai #education #policy #governance

Simon Taylor    

Simon Michael Taylor is a PhD candidate supervised by Associate Professor Andrew Murphie and DECRA fellow Dr. Michael Richardson. His dissertation investigates case-studies that automate technologies of perception [i.e. operational imaging, sensor development, algorithmic quantification, pattern recognition]. As machines learn to autonomously interpret and misinterpret data across the ‘domains of life’ (Amoore, 2019) he explores reformations in human capacities and shifts in power relations from distributed intelligence, bio-technical capita + media infrastructure.

UNSW: www.allenshub.unsw.edu.au/index.php/researchers/simon-taylor

#hps #historyphilosophyofscience #patternrecognition #tacitknowledges #remotesensing #artificialintelligence

Shima Saniei     

Shima Saniei is a PhD candidate and casual academic at the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia. Shima's research focuses on public relations practices of small activist groups. In her research, Shima examines how activist groups define themselves rhetorically to gain social capital to facilitate change in society.         

ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Shima_Saniei Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/shima.saniei   Twitter: @Shima_Saniei
      

#activism #identification #zonesofmeaning #symbolicconvergencetheory #publicrelations

DIANA KREEMERS

Dr Diana Kreemers’ research interests include representation, recognition, mediatization, and listening practices of professionals in democratic organisations. Her critical research on institutional listening is positioned at the intersection of media studies, journalism studies, sociology, and organisational communication. She has over eight years of experience working with policymakers, bureaucrats, journalists and media users. She worked on research projects on community media to develop new professional practices and she investigated listening practices in political context in a two-year participatory research project at the Dutch government. Her PhD Research analysed the politics of listening necessary to support the democratic potential of refugee voices.

Academia.edu: https://unsw.academia.edu/DianaKreemers
ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Diana_Kreemers2

#institutionallistening #socialjustice #refugeemedia #representation #recognition