ORCID Profile
0000-0001-5031-1235
Current Organisation
Monash University
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Communication Technology and Digital Media Studies | Sociology | Sociology and Social Studies of Science and Technology | Social Change | Consumption and Everyday Life | Communication and Media Studies |
Expanding Knowledge through Studies of Human Society | Social Structure and Health | Substance Abuse | The Media | Workforce Transition and Employment | Expanding Knowledge in Language, Communication and Culture
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2021
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 28-07-2022
DOI: 10.1080/13691058.2022.2092213
Abstract: Analysing survey data from 1,304 LGBTQ + young people in Australia collected in 2016, this paper considers key distinctions between the experiences of bisexual and pansexual participants, and lesbian and gay participants in relation to social media use and aspects of connection, harassment and mental health. Presenting quantitative data, illustrated by qualitative extracts, we found broad similarities in motivations for using social media and how participants connected to peers and communities. There were some statistically significant differences, however, in respondents' motivations for using social media and who they connected with on these platforms. Importantly, bisexual and pansexual participants reported more negative experiences of harassment and exclusion across all major social media platforms when compared to their lesbian and gay peers. Bisexual and pansexual respondents also reported poorer mental health experiences. These findings speak to the different impacts of discrimination and oppression that young people experience in everyday life. There is a need for focused attention on bisexual and pansexual young people in academic, policy and youth-work domains. Young people will benefit from more substantial school-based education on LGBTQ + identities - beyond the experiences of gay and lesbian people - to 'usualise' varieties of difference in gender and sexual identity.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-04-2017
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 19-08-2020
Abstract: Mobile phones are changing behaviour, relationships, communication and the dynamics of physical environments. As such, reliance on the device for everyday activities has increased. Consequently, “nomophobia”, defined as the fear of being without one’s mobile phone, has emerged as a new phobia. The current study aimed to determine if nomophobia can increase the likelihood of problematic dependent, prohibited and dangerous mobile phone use. The s le comprised 2838 participants (males n = 1337 females n = 1501) recruited from various online platforms. The instrument used to measure nomophobia was the Nomophobia Questionnaire (NMP-Q), while problematic mobile phone use was measured using the Problematic Mobile Phone Use Questionnaire (PMPUQ-R). The findings revealed a strong positive correlation between nomophobia and all three problematic use factors. In addition to nomophobia, regression models revealed younger age and more time spent on a mobile phone per day significantly increased problematic dependency, prohibited use and dangerous use. Males were more likely to engage in prohibited and dangerous use, while no significant gender differences were found in dependent use. These findings support the need for further research into the relationship between nomophobia and specific aspects of problematic mobile phone use, such as using a mobile phone while driving.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-05-2019
Abstract: Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and other non-heterosexual and gender erse (LGBTIQ+) young people utilise a range of digital media platforms to explore identity, find support and manage boundaries. Less well understood, however, is how they navigate risk and rewards across the different social media platforms that are part of their everyday lives. In this study, we draw on the concept of affordances, as well as recent work on curation, to examine 23 in-depth interviews with LGBTIQ+ young people about their uses of social media. Our findings show how the affordances of platforms used by LGBTIQ+ young people, and the contexts of their engagement, situate and inform a typology of uses. These practices – focused on finding, building and fostering support – draw on young people’s social media literacies, where their affective experiences range from feelings of safety, security and control, to fear, disappointment and anger. These practices also work to manage boundaries between what is ‘for them’ (family, work colleagues, friends) and ‘not for them’. This work allowed our participants to mitigate risk, and circumnavigate normative platform policies and norms, contributing to queer-world building beyond the self. In doing so, we argue that young people’s social media curation strategies contribute to their health and well-being.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-05-2012
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-08-2021
Abstract: This article is a qualitative analysis of how people aged in their 30s and 40s use dating apps and websites to repartner following relationship separation or orce. While ‘mid-life’ is a period of significant relationship churn, there is little sociological research that addresses how people in this age group use digital dating technologies to repartner. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with a small group of Australians, the article shows how dating technologies help ‘thicken’ thin dating markets associated with time pressures and access to the night economy, but also loss and convergence of friendship networks unique to mid-life. The study highlights the impact of gender on digital repartnering experiences, particularly experiences of online safety, and introduces the concept of ‘emotional filtering’ to describe how past relationships specifically shape the repartnering process for this middle-aged group.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-10-2014
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2018
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 10-2016
Abstract: For the past 12 years, Facebook has played a significant role in mediating the lives of its users. Disclosures on the site go on to serve as intimate, co-constructed life records, albeit with unique and always-evolving affordances. The ways in which romantic relationships are mediated on the site are complex and contested: “What is the significance of articulating a romantic relationship on Facebook?” “Why do some choose to make socially and culturally critical moments like the beginning and ends of relationships visible on Facebook, whereas others (perhaps within the same relationship) do not?” “How do these practices change over time?” and “When is it time to go “Facebook official”?” In this article, we draw on qualitative research with Facebook users in their 20s in Australia and the United Kingdom who have been using the site for 5 years or more. Interviews with participants revealed that romantic relationships were central to many of their growing up narratives, and in this article, we draw out ex les to discuss four kinds of (non-exclusive) practices: (1) overt relationship status disclosures, mediated through the “relationship status” affordance of the site, (2) implied relationship disclosures, mediated through an increase in images and tags featuring romantic partners, (3) the intended absence of relationship visibility, and (4) later-erased or revised relationship disclosures. We also critique the ways in which Facebook might work to produce normative “relationship traces,” privileging neat linearity, monogamy, and obfuscating (perhaps usefully, perhaps not) the messy complexity of romantic relationships.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2021
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 06-2022
Abstract: Masculinities scholarship tends toward describing autonomy as bound up with hegemonic masculine ideals such as independence, atomization, and self‐sufficiency, without fully delving into the concept of autonomy. This article offers a more in‐depth conceptual treatment of autonomy, compared to its more simplified rendering in the literature on the dominant relational conceptualizations of masculinities. In doing so, we follow recent calls to avoid categorizing men according to typologies of masculinity, drawing instead on feminist theorizations of masculine autonomy and relationality to explore how both manifest in men's lives. We draw on a study of men's drinking practices, with our data coming from focus groups with 101 men in metropolitan and regional/rural Victoria, Australia but the issues we attend to have relevance, and can be an impetus, for further scholarly thinking about autonomy in men's lives well beyond drinking practices, and in other similar industrialized nations. We explore how masculine autonomy remains an influential and harmful discourse, often impeding possibilities for men's greater intimacy, connection and care and reproducing gendered hierarchies. However, we simultaneously highlight how men are inescapably relationally situated, exposing masculine autonomy as a discursive ideal of valorized forms of masculinity rather than an achievable state in practice. We argue that acknowledging how men are relationally embedded and interdependent in practice offers potential avenues for further fostering men's care, intimacy and relationality, and might work toward ameliorating gendered inequalities that see care work and the work of sustaining relational networks disproportionately falling to women and marginalized men.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 15-11-2022
DOI: 10.1177/00914509211057294
Abstract: Notions of masculinity have played a central role in social and cultural research on men’s drinking events. Within this context, masculinity is regularly called on to explain the problematic disparities that mark men’s alcohol consumption, including men’s disproportionate involvement in drinking and a range of alcohol-related harms. More recently, however, researchers have begun to emphasize men’s drinking events as sites of care and support, leading some to suggest that men’s drinking masculinities are evolving in affirmative and health promoting ways. While unsettling the tendency of scholars to problematize men’s drinking masculinities, foregrounding the possibilities of men’s care potentially obscures its complexities and constraints. In this paper, we are concerned to critically re-examine the relationship between masculinity, care, and events of men’s alcohol consumption. Where some authors have positioned men’s care as an innate or uncomplicated good, we draw on a feminist ethics of care approach to explore its complexities, constraints, and exclusions. Through focus group discussions with 101 men, our analysis describes how ideals of masculine autonomy emerged through men’s accounts of drinking events, fundamentally shaping the constitution, practice, and possibilities of care. For the men in our study, the valorization of autonomy fostered ambivalence and tension around care, hindering their capacity as care givers and receivers. In turn, opportunities and accountability for care were overlooked, avoided, or displaced onto women. By highlighting the complexity of men’s care, our account complicates existing scholarship on men’s drinking while also gesturing toward new avenues for public health practice. We conclude by outlining how a more concerted focus on care may be integrated into public health policy, research, and programming and, in the process, contribute to the promotion of more health affirming and ethical modes of masculinity.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2020
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-10-2016
Abstract: Despite being distinct, online social spaces are governed by norms and conventions reminiscent of those that govern offline social spaces. Our research into the ways young people’s ‘private’ or ‘quasi-private’ spaces are managed indicates that the strategies used to exert a sense of control over sites like Facebook borrow heavily from the strategies employed to manage offline private spaces like the teenage bedroom. In this article, we explore these continuities and then consider the limitations of applying a bedroom metaphor to online social spaces. We then consider how these strategies of control are related to a process of ‘marking out’ the narrative of ‘growing up’ both in online and offline social spaces.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 19-12-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 13-09-2017
Abstract: Tinder is a location-based smartphone application used by young adults. Advertised as a popular and unique way to forge connections, Tinder’s introduction into intimate life is indicative of increased information and communication technology (ICT) usage within this sphere. While the impact of ICT use within intimate life has been debated, little sociological research has investigated Tinder within this context. This article draws on data from a small scale exploratory study, including surveys (n = 203) and interviews (n = 10), examining the use of Tinder by young Australians (aged 18 to 30) and how use contributes to intimate outcomes. While survey results provide insight regarding engagement with Tinder and its use in intimate life, two key themes – (1) Tinder’s use as an additional tool in intimate life and (2) its perceived impact on ‘connection quality’ – demonstrate Tinder’s role in intimate outcomes. Findings support Jurgenson’s depiction of today’s societies as ones characterised by augmented reality rather than digital dualism.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 30-05-2017
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-2020
Publisher: Cognizant, LLC
Date: 06-10-2015
DOI: 10.3727/108354215X14400815080686
Abstract: In tourism studies/tourism management, traditional approaches to the segmentation of tourists have tended to focus upon the tangible aspects of why people travel, such as visitors' motivations, demographic characteristics, and values and behavior exhibited at specific destinations. This review article from Hardy and Robards takes a critical approach to challenge the governing assumption involved here, that marketing studies of “tourism” should routinely or necessarily focus on the in idual and thus upon class-based characteristics such as income to define tourists. Rather, the authors argue that tourists may be fruitfully segmented by commonalities of intangible aspects, such as “a shared sense of sentiment,” “tourist ritual,” “collective bonding,” and “belonging.” Hardy and Robards thereby suggest that neotribal approaches indeed offer rich opportunities to do this by empowering the exploration of tourists' symbolic and behavioral characteristics. This review article consonantly proposes that by returning to Maffesoli's work, researchers in the twin fields of tourism studies/tourism management may make substantial critical contributions to unfolding understandings of and about “consumer tribes.” Hence, Hardy and Robards suggest that subtribes exist within broader neotribes and that that sort of “membership” may not in fact be as fluid as many investigators have previously suggested. (Abstract by Reviews Editor)
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 29-06-2021
Abstract: Data selfies are representations of self through personal quantitative data: from graphs of Tinder dating outcomes, through to the story of brain surgery told through daily step counts. In this article, we explore practices around what we call ‘confessional data selfies’ shared on the reddit forum r/DataIsBeautiful, where more than 14 million subscribers – predominantly straight men – share often complex and intimate quantitative self-representations of their lives. We draw on an analysis of the top 1000 posts on r/DataIsBeautiful, and a sub-s le of 59 data selfies, to identify patterns in confessional data selfie practices. We identify three themes: families and relationships, routine management, and body rhythms. We argue that these data selfies generate opportunities for self-reflection, connection, discussions of mental health, grief and other personal experiences. Significantly, this occurs largely between men, modulating processes of gendered impression management and expanding the conceptualisation of selfie work.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 21-01-2021
Abstract: The rise of crowdsourced and participatory digital platforms which aim to make visible the experiences of otherwise marginalised people are significant within the broader landscape of digitally mediated community spaces. One ex le of such media is Queering the Map, a digital storymapping platform where users anonymously pin ‘queer moments’ and memories to places. While the mediation of affect and intimacy in digital spaces among queer people is increasingly attended to in scholarly work, the cartographic and archival remains hitherto underexplored. Drawing on an analysis of almost 2000 micro-stories geolocated to Australia, in this article we explore various aspects of story contribution that situate Queering the Map as a lively cartographic archive. Rather than necessarily anonymous (as the platform dictates), the posts, we argue, entail various deliberated directions or gestures, encoded for audiences: what we term stories for someone. We highlight these publicly private stories’ connective and affective underpinnings, and the political potentialities (and problems) therein for queer belonging and community-building. In doing so we seek to contribute to scholarship on digital archives, crowdsourcing, and advance conceptualisations of digital intimacies.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-02-2017
Abstract: This article is centred on a case study of the ‘Totally Straight’ (r/TotallyStraight) ‘subreddit’ on social media site reddit. r/TotallyStraight serves as a web forum for sharing gay pornography amongst men who identity as straight. I draw on a small-scale study of the r/TotallyStraight subreddit, conducted over a period of three months. Analysis reveals that while r/TotallyStraight is largely used as a forum for sharing porn depicting men, it also serves as a space for affirmation and sharing personal narratives related to contested ‘mostly straight’ sexual identities. The moderators of the subreddit, and the users themselves, foster a supportive, non-judgemental discourse. It is argued that this phenomenon could be representative of broader cultural shifts towards less rigidly defined sexual identities.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-08-2018
Abstract: Since the advent of the smartphone, users have become accustomed to alerts, notifications and reminders to interact with their internet-connected devices. But how do people make sense of prompts to exercise, eat or sleep? Digital self-tracking is a phenomenon that has grown substantially in recent years. However, despite some notable exceptions, there is still little sociological research into how users of wearable devices and apps subjectively experience self-tracking. This article draws on findings from a small qualitative study with 11 participants to reveal eminent themes in how users make sense of their self-tracking. Utilising and extending Lupton’s theorising of self-tracking, we argue for triple roles of self-tracking devices ‘tool’, ‘toy’ and ‘tutor’. This trichotomy helps to characterise the use of self-tracking devices and apps, allowing us to reflect on the wider, ongoing implications of self-tracking.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 04-2011
Abstract: Since the early 2000s, sociologists of youth have been engaged in a debate concerning the relevance of ‘subculture’ as a theoretical framework in the light of more recent postmodern-influenced interpretations of youth identities as fluid, dynamic and reflexively constructed. Utilizing ethnographic data collected on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, this article considers such debates in relation to social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook. Although online identity expression has been interpreted as exhibiting subcultural qualities, preliminary empirical research informing this article lends itself to a more neo-tribal reading.
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2017
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 16-01-2017
Abstract: The literature pertaining to critical tourism studies has sought to challenge the traditional scientific dichotomy between the detached researcher and research participant in the production of tourism knowledge. This article argues for the value of an ethnographic approach in further challenging that dichotomy, by way of a study seeking to better understand a specific culture in tourism: gay resorts. We aim to outline the methodological component of this research project, centred on a gay resort in Australia, and to argue for the value of ethnography in understanding other specific tourism cultures. Often a researcher’s proximity to and pronounced familiarity with a topic is obfuscated in service of ‘non-biased’ and ‘value-neutral’ results, but in this article, we attend closely to the value of insider research in critical tourism studies. The experiences reported here – around insider perspectives, rapport building, in-depth interviews, participant observations, becoming embedded in a research environment and respecting participants – are argued to have much wider currency.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 11-02-2015
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
Date: 2014
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 08-2013
Abstract: Research into youth engagement with social network sites such as MySpace and Facebook highlights a complex set of ethical dimensions, which do not always translate easily from similar concerns in traditional offline research. On social network sites, it is clear that many young people are managing their online presences in strategic ways, often involving conventions around determining access to these spaces. If these sites are framed by their young users as at least ‘partially private’, how should the researcher seek access to these spaces and how should the researcher operate in these spaces if access is permitted? This article reflects on qualitative research undertaken by the author from 2007 to 2010, which involved ‘friending’ participants on MySpace and Facebook. Based on this reflection, and contextualized by an engagement with literature concerning both Internet research and youth research, this article argues that social network sites blur the public rivate dichotomy. Thus, research engaging with participants on these sites requires ongoing ethical reflection around assumptions about public and private information, and researchers, institutional ethics committees and review boards must develop and make use of suitably informed expertise to both conduct and review future scholarship in this area.
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH
Date: 06-2019
Abstract: Spatial metaphors have long been part of the way we make sense of media. From early conceptualizations of the internet, we have come to understand digital media as spaces that support, deny or are subject to different mobilities. With the availability of GPS data, somatic bodily movement has enjoyed significant attention in media geography, but recently innovations in digital ethnographic methods have paid attention to other, more ephemeral ways of moving and being with social media. In this article, we consider three case studies in qualitative, “small data” social media research methods: the walkthrough, the go-along and the scroll back methods. Each is centred on observing navigational flows through app infrastructures, fingers hovering across device surfaces and scrolling-and-remembering practices in social media archives. We advocate an ethnography of ephemeral media mobilities and suggest that small data approaches should analytically integrate four dimensions of mediated mobility: bodies and affect, media objects and environments, memory and narrative, and the overall research encounter.
Start Date: 03-2021
End Date: 09-2024
Amount: $232,688.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 06-2019
End Date: 12-2023
Amount: $399,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 06-2021
End Date: 06-2024
Amount: $265,949.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity