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Dr Reza Arab is a Lecturer in Applied Linguistics at the School of Languages and Cultures. His expertise lies in pragmatics, cultural linguistics, and intercultural communication, with a focus on how humour, metaphor, and language practices shape belonging, identity, and interaction across cultural and institutional contexts.

His research spans historical pragmatics, contrastive semantics, and discourse analysis, particularly in national and Indigenous settings. He has led and contributed to projects on humour in prison discourse, media representations, and political communication. Dr Arab is also the major convenor for English as an International Language (EIL) at UQ.

Lemi Baruh (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication, 2007) is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland. He is the co-founder of the Social Interaction and Media Lab at Koç University, Istanbul. His research spans various topics, including the effects of social media on interpersonal attraction, surveillance, online security, privacy in online environments, and the role of media in shaping public opinion. His recent work also investigates misinformation and conspiracy theories in the context of health communication, with a particular focus on the COVID-19 pandemic and the influence of news and social media on public perceptions and behaviors related to health.

Dr. Alex Beare is a Lecturer in communication at the University of Queensland. His research specialises in subscription video on demand, audience cultures, and media representations of masculinity. Prior to coming to Brisbane, Alex taught at the University of Adelaide with a teaching focus in Digital Cultures, Media Theory, Screen Studies, and Research Methods. Since completing his PhD, Alex has published in journals such as Television & New Media, the International Journal of Communication, and Critical Studies in Television, and has contributed to ABC Radio and The Conversation. He is also the author of The New Audience for Old TV (Routledge, 2024). Alex is currently leading cross-institutional research collaborations relating to the emergence of ‘supportive streaming’ and digital news representations of homophobia in the AFL.

Nicholas Carah is Director of the Centre for Digital Cultures & Societies in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Professor in the School of Communication and Arts. He is an Associate Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and a Chief Investigator on ARC Discovery and Linkage projects. In 2023, they were Deputy Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. Nicholas' research examines the algorithmic and participatory advertising model of digital media platforms, with a sustained focus on digital alcohol marketing. Nicholas is the author of Media and Society: Power, Platforms & Participation (2021), Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture (2016), Media and Society: production, content and participation (2015), Pop Brands: branding, popular music and young people (2010). And, co-editor of Digital Intimate Publics and Social Media (2018) and Conflict in My Outlook (2022). Nicholas is a Director and Deputy Chair of the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education.

I am an applied social researcher working on how people, institutions, and decision processes interact in complex and contested settings, including energy, infrastructure, and regional development.

My work examines social risk, cumulative impacts, information quality, trust, and participation, with a focus on how these dynamics shape real-world decision-making, implementation, and institutional credibility.

I use mixed-methods social research to generate practical, decision-relevant insights for organisations working with communities, supporting more adaptive, context-sensitive, and socially robust practice.

Skye Doherty is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication and Arts at UQ. She is an expert in using creative and design-led research methods to explore alternative futures and address wicked problems. Her work has responded to issues in the news media, law, disaster resilience, and energy and water security, among others, and has led to both conceptual and practical outcomes.

Her design artefacts include the NewsCube, an award-winning storytelling tool, Vim, a tangible energy story, a suite of concepts for community-led bushfire management, and Wicked Thinking, an independent magazine. She has developed frameworks for journalism innovation and used codesign methods to improve the experiences of injured workers, a project that led to legislative change.

Her current and recent projects include the GEF-funded Coral Reef Rescue project and the ARC Training Centre for Climate-Resilient Water. She is the current Treasurer of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and is a member of UQ’s Human-Centred Computing research group in the School of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering. Previously, she led the Global Change Scholars Program in the UQ Graduate School – a year-long PhD experience focused on industry research collaboration and impact.

She came to academic research after an international career as a journalist, and her experience spans leading international media companies as well as startups.

Dr Tom Doig is a creative nonfiction author, investigative journalist and scholar. Tom was the recipient of the 2023 CLNZ-NZSA Writer's Award for his work on prepper subcultures in Aotearoa New Zealand. He has written two books about the unprecedented 2014 Hazelwood mine fire disaster: Hazelwood (Penguin Random House, 2020) and The Coal Face (Penguin Books Australia, 2015). Hazelwood was a finalist for the 2020 Walkley Book Award, Journalism and the 2021 Ned Kelly Awards, Best True Crime and Highly Commended in the 2020 Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, Non-Fiction. The Coal Face was joint winner of the 2015 Oral History Victoria Education Innovation Award. Dr Doig has also written a humorous travel memoir, Mörön to Mörön: Two men, two bikes, one Mongolian misadventure (Allen & Unwin, 2013). He is the contributing editor of the interdisciplinary collection Living with the Climate Crisis: Voices from Aotearoa (Bridget Williams Books, 2020).

Dr Doig teaches creative nonfiction and poetry.

As a scholar, Dr Doig is interested in interdisciplinary approaches to the accelerating climate crisis, with a focus on the cultural, social and psychological aspects of climate breakdown. He is currently researching a new book: We Are All Preppers Now (forthcoming with Scribe Publications), documenting survivalists, doomsday preppers, climate activists and other subcultures of imminent collapse around the world.

Before joining the School of Economics in 2001, Peter Earl had spent a decade as Professor of Economics at Lincoln University in New Zealand. He decided to move to UQ after spending a semester in the School of Economics as a Visiting Professor in 1999 and having been impressed by the Library, the quality of the students and the School's strength in evolutionary economics.

He specialises in business economics, consumer research and economic method, with an interest in the impact of psychological factors and problems of information and knowledge on decision-making. He is also interested in Post Keynesian approaches to macroeconomics and monetary theory.

His approach blends elements from Austrian Economics, Behavioral Economics, Evolutionary Economics, Institutional Economics and Post Keynesian Economics. He has served as co-editor of the Journal of Economic Psychology and is a founding member of the editorial boards of Review of Political Economy and Marketing Theory. He is the author or editor of eighteen books and numerous articles and book chapters.

Maureen Engel is a Lecturer in Digital Culture in the School of Communication and Arts. She was formerly Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Alberta, Canada. At Alberta, she served as Director of Digital Humanities (2011-13; 2015-2019), and Director of the Canadian Institute for Research Computing in Arts (2011-2019). Formally trained as a textual scholar, her background is in cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. She brings these methods/orientations to her research on digital culture, with a particular interest in locative media, XR, and gaming. She is the author of the game Go Queer, a ludic locative media experience of queer history.

Bonnie Evans is a Lecturer in Media Studies at the University of Queensland. Her research has addressed the intersections between feminist politics and screen media, particularly film and television, and she has published on true crime documentary. Her most recent journal article examines rape-revenge film in the context of the Me Too movement, specifically Corale Fargeat's 2017 film Revenge, and her forthcoming monograph The New Feminist Horror will be published by Edinburgh University Press in 2025. Her book will explore aesthetic and thematic links between contemporary feminisms, including the Me Too Movement and recent horror cinema, and the PhD thesis that forms the basis of the book received a UQ Dean's Award for Oustanding HDR Theses in 2022. Bonnie teaches across film and television studies, media studies and digital media and in 2025, she won the HASS Early Career Teaching Excellence Award for her innovations in teaching.

She is interested in supervising HDR research on the following broad topics:

• Gender in film, television and media studies
• Feminist media studies
• Genre film, television and media, particularly horror
• Embodied approaches to media studies (phenomenology, affect, feeling and emotion)
• Documentary studies, true crime and reality television
• Gender and sexual violence in film and television
• Feminist movements in media (#MeToo, the fourth wave, second wave etc).

I'm a linguistic anthropologist who studies how communicative events in Indonesia figure in the building and maintenance of social relationships and common knowledge among Indonesians. During my PhD and post-PhD early years my research often involved long periods of fieldwork in Indonesia. As research funding and sabbatical have become scarce, I have increasingly turned to publically available data, such as Indonesian films, newspapers, social media and so on. I have published extensively on my research, including Language, Migration, and Identity: Neighbourhood Talk in Indonesia (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Language and Superdiversity: Indonesians Knowledging at Home and Abroad (Oxford University Press, 2015), Global Leadership Talk: Constructing Good Governance in Indonesia (Oxford University Press, 2020); Reimagining Rapport (Oxford University Press, 2021); Rapport and the discursive co-construction of social relations in fieldwork settings (Mouton De Gruyter, 2019); and Contact Talk: The Discursive Organization of Contact and Boundaries (with Deborah Cole and Howard Manns, Routledge, 2020).

The continuing interest underpinning my research is that of the self-presentation of the non-native speaker, in different genres. This has led me to work on: culturally determined practices; cross-cultural comparisons; and on intercultural behaviour, how this is conceptualized and how, in practice, encounters between different expectations of appropriate behaviour play out.

One focus of my attention has been the proliferation of new intercultural encounters which are made possible by online technologies. In particular, Juliana de Nooy and I undertook a project examining discussion fora on media websites, culminating in our 2009 book. The pedagogical implications of this work, and my own teaching practices have allowed me to develop expertise in language learning and technology which I have extended through other collaborations (e.g. Cowley & Hanna, 2013 on Wikipedia) research supervisions and publications which derive from it (Gao & Hanna, 2016, on instructional software; work with Khosravi, Gyamfit et al; and a forthcoming paper with Aljohani).

One current project focuses on another critical area of intercultural contact: Study Abroad experiences. Many institutions encourage Study Abroad participants to share their experiences online with other students, with a view to publicizing the opportunities and providing advice - such testimonials are the primary source for my current work. I am looking at the ‘selves’ which these online testimonials hold up as exemplary (see Hanna 2016 on food; also Hanna & de Nooy 2003 b; 2006). What, the student reader of these testimonials might ask, will I feel like? How will I change? What counts as successful life as a Study Abroad student? How can I be successful too? In order to tackle these questions, I draw on theories of learner motivation and imaginary or ideal selves.

This interest in self-presentation underpins a current project on employability and language students (SLC funded project, undertaken with Alicia Toohey).

Dr Helen Haydon is a Senior Research Fellow and Registered Psychologist at the University of Queensland. She has national standing, and an emerging international reputation, as a digital health researcher with a focus on aged and palliative care, psycho-oncology and carer wellbeing. She leads 3 applied nationwide digital health research programs: 1/ Palliative Care ECHO, a Federally funded National Palliative Care Project that connects services and upskills health professionals across Australia in palliative care; 2/ Elder ECHO, a telementoring program to support the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation’s (NACCHO) Elder Care Support workforce in the delivery of Culturally safe aged care and; 3/ Caring for the Carer, an online intervention for carers of people with brain tumour. http://caringforthecarer.org.au/

Other research includes: evaluation of telepalliative care services (e.g. patient/ carer outcomes and perceptions and staff perceptions); voluntary assisted dying; technology supported grief and bereavement support and; digital mental health.

She is a Registered Psychologist with clinical experience working with a range of issues and diverse populations and has over ten years’ experience teaching and facilitating workshops on psychology and health communication.

Dr Leah Henrickson is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Cultures at the University of Queensland. She is the author of Reading Computer-Generated Texts (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and other peer-reviewed articles about how we understand text generation systems and output, artificial intelligence, and digital media environments. Dr Henrickson also studies digital storytelling for critical self-reflection, pedagogy, community building, and commercial benefit. She is the author of Digital Storytelling: An Introduction (Polity, 2025).

Dr Henrickson serves as the School of Communication and Arts' Deputy Director, Teaching and Learning. She is also an elected non-professorial member of the University of Queensland's Academic Board, and a nominated member of the Academic Board's Digital Learning Sub-Committee. She is an elected member of the Board of Directors for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP), and serves on the Editorial Boards of New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia and Anthem Press' 'Anthem Studies in Book History, Publishing and Print Culture' series.

Dr Henrickson is especially keen to collaborate on projects involving digital methods and media, hermeneutics, histories of communications media, and unconventional text production and dissemination.

Supported by over 20 external grants - including an ARC Laureate - I am known for developing insights around three themes: (1) rejection of science and technology, (2) pro-environmental behaviour, and (3) intergroup relations. In each domain I have developed unique models designed to understand the logic behind supposedly “irrational” behaviour, and used them to facilitate attitude and behaviour change. My most recent work focuses on understanding (and reducing) people’s motivations to reject scientific consensus, including the psychology of climate inaction. Matthew is currently leading the Net Zero Observatory at the University of Queensland, a multi-disciplinary group of academics and practitioners who design strategies to accelerate industry action and community support for rapid decarbonisation.

Associate Professor Eve Klein’s compositions have been called vivid, revolutionary, inclusive, moving and must-see. Winner of the 2023 Art Music Award for Experimental Practice, Klein brings orchestral music into dialogue with immersive and interactive technologies for screen, art music and mass festival audiences. Klein's work has been experienced by hundreds of thousands of people globally at Salisbury Cathedral, Burning Man, New York University, VIVID Sydney, MONA, GOMA, Brisbane Festival, World Science Festival, the Arts Centre Melbourne and the State Library of Queensland. As Lead Composer for Textile Audio, Eve crafts City Symphony, an interactive AR music experience overlaying Brisbane CBD (available via iOS and Android app stores).

Klein creates artworks in collaboration with community groups, festivals, researchers, and NGOs to achieve community transformation goals. Recent projects have explored gendered and racial violence, climate change, disaster recovery and refugee rights. Klein's work, Vocal Womb, is an example of this practice, allowing the audience to explore the relationship between voice, identity and power by stepping into and directly manipulating the voice of another. The premier was called the "#1 coolest thing at MOFO 2018" (Timeout Melbourne) and "One of the must-see music/artworks of the 2018 festival... a deeply considered engagement with the history and traditions of opera" (The Conversation).

Klein is Associate Professor of Music Technology, leading an interactive music and spatial audio research cluster at the University of Queensland, guiding postgraduate composers on the creation of immersive, interacitve, virtual reality and augmented reality concert works and operas.

"This is contemporary music at its most relevant – it is simultaneously inward and outward focused in addressing the challenge of its existence and its capacity to produce something great.” - Melonie Bayl-Smith, Cyclic Defrost, Issue 31

“Excellence in Experimental Practice was awarded to Eve Klein for City Symphony, a Brisbane sound walk revolutionising audiences' engagement with urban environments, underpinned by an ethos of collaborative inclusivity and accessibility.” -Australian Music Centre

“One of the must-see music/art works of the 2018 festival was Eve Klein’s Vocal Womb … a deeply considered engagement with the history and traditions of opera.” - Svenja J. Kratz -The Conversation

Shuang is an internationally recognised intercultural communication expert, specialising in the areas of ageing and immigration, acculturation, identity negotiation, and intercultural relations. Her research examines how older people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds build a sense of home as they live and age in a foreign land; how family and community care can be integrated to provide culturally appropriate, accessible and sustainale care for older people; how older people interact with their physical, social, cultural, and digital environments to develop attachment to place; and the consequences of these interactions for well-being. Shuang's work has been published in high-ranking international journals, and two sole authored books: Identity, hybirdity and cultural home (2015; Rowman & Littlefield) and Chinese migrants ageing in a foreign land (2019; Routledge). Her lead-authored textbook, Introducing intercultural communication: Global cultures and contexts, is in its 4th edition, and previous three editions have been adopted in 26 countries across 4 continents, with holdings in libraries of prestigeous institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, University of Oxford, University of Cape Town, and University of Zurich. Shuang is a fellow of the International Academy of Intercultural Research.

Shuang welcomes inquires from prospective Higher Degreee by Research students who are interested in working with her on their theses in any of the related research areas.

Dr Kylie (Anderson) Navuku has extensive experience in academic teaching and research. At The University of Queensland (UQ) Kylie is a teaching-practice focused academic, teaching in Communication courses (undergraduate and postgraduate). Her teaching includes: Public Interest Communication; Communication Theory; Communication Management and Leadership; and Intercultural Communication.

Kylie's research interests are at the intersection of politics and communication (including media/journalism) with a focus on island countries and oceans. Most recently her work has focused on climate change and the challenges for island-based artists engaged in environmental communication.

As a communication practitioner, Kylie has worked with non-government, government, and inter-governmental stakeholders contributing to campaigns/ initiatives with the purpose of raising awareness and furthering public education on various themes (including conservation, climate change, and civic education). Kylie is currently a co-Theme Leader for "Communication for Climate Action" with the Centre for Communication and Social Change (CfCSC). Her curent focus as a practitioner is investigating ways to communicate bioeconomy to non-specialist audiences.

In addition to a PhD from UQ, Kylie has a MA (IntRel)(Res) [Master of Arts (International Relations) by Research] and a BIntSt (Hons) [Bachelor of International Studies (Honours)] from Flinders University.

Other university employment includes the University of the South Pacific (USP) and Flinders University of South Australia. At USP, Kylie was based at Laucala Campus in Fiji but her role also took her to the campuses and centres in Majuro (Marshall Islands), Honiara (Solomon Islands), Nuku'alofa (Tonga), Alafua (Apia, Samoa), and Rarotonga (Cook Islands). At Flinders, Kylie was based at the Bedford Park Campus, while at UQ she is based at St Lucia campus in Queensland.

Dr Giselle Newton (she/her) is a digital health sociologist at the Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies and a Research Fellow on the Australian Ad Observatory in the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Giselle's research agenda is focused on understanding experiences of fertility and family in a digital age. Giselle has led projects considering how reproductive and genetic technologies shape personal life and family relationships, for example on donor-conceived people's use of digital technologies, direct-to-consumer DNA testing and digital advertising of fertility treatments and services. Giselle is interested in methodological and ethical considerations, and participatory, creative and data donation methods in social research. She is experienced working in interdisciplinary teams developing and employing digital tools and observatories to better understand individuals' (often unobservable and ephemeral) digital social worlds.

Giselle has published in Sociology, Human Reproduction, Social Media + Society, Sociology of Health & Illness, Sociological Research Online. Giselle was awarded the Early Career International Visiting Fellowship, University of Sheffield for 2024-25. In 2025, she was a keynote speaker at the Fertility Society of Australia and New Zealand Annual Conference in Adelaide. Giselle has been an invited speaker in Japan (Donor Link Japan) and Denmark (LGBT+ Danmark).

Research

Current projects:

• Ethical, social and regulatory implications of informal sperm donation, ARC Discovery Project
• Targeted digital advertising in fertility, reproduction and parenting, the Australian Ad Observatory
• Engaging consumers to work towards social license for implementation of AI in healthcare
• Technologies of the Body: Women, Visibility and Museum Collections

Past projects:

• Understanding stakeholders’ perspectives on public inquiries in sexual and reproductive health
• DNA datascapes: how individuals seek information about family via direct-to-consumer DNA testing
• How alcohol and gambling companies target people most at risk with marketing for addictive products on social media, using the Australian Mobile Ad Toolkit (contract research project commissioned by the Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education Limited, with Prof Nic Carah and Lauren Hayden)
• On target: Understanding advertising in the fertility sector with data from the Australian Ad Observatory, a winter research collaboration (with Romy Wilson Gray and Maria Proctor).
• Everyday belongings: how Australian donor-conceived adults’ use digital technologies to bond, sleuth, educate and strategise. Giselle's PhD study won Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Theses in 2022.
• Understanding care endings: Sociological and educational approaches to support pathways out of caring

Research supervision and development

Current students:

• Lauren Hayden (PhD candidate, Communications and Arts, UQ) - Digital advertising and cultures of alcohol consumption on social media platforms (with Prof Nicholas Carah, Prof Dan Angus) (2022-2026)
• Adriana Saab (Master of Genetic Counselling, UTS) - Understanding targeted advertising of genetic tests, products and services in Australia: a thematic analysis (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive)
• Quita Olsen (PhD candidate, Queensland Digital Health Centre, UQ) - Developing an Inclusive Framework and Communication Strategy towards the Public’s Willingness to Share Health Data for Secondary Purposes (with Prof Jason Pole, Dr Leanna Woods, Dr Amalie Dyda) (2025-2028)
• Juan Ospina Deaza (PhD candidate, Communications and Arts, UQ) How digital platforms shape experiences of male (in)fertility/parenthood (with Dr Giang Nyugen-Thu) (2026-2029)

Past students:

• Phoebe Price-Barker (Honours, Criminology, UQ) - Assessing cyber vulnerabilities in direct-to-consumer genetic testing platforms (with Dr Caitlin Curtis) (2025)
• Simone Sanders (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - Representations of breast cancer predisposition testing on TikTok: a qualitative analysis (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive)
• Lina Choi (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - Unpacking Narratives about Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing in TikTok Videos: A Thematic Analysis (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive)
• Cushla McKinney (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - The impact of direct-to-consumer DNA testing on genetic counselling practice (with Dr Lisa Dive, A/Prof Aideen McInerny-Leo, Dr Vaishnavi Nathan).
• Diya Dilip Porwal (Master of Genetic Counselling student, UTS) - Experiences of carrier screening and genetic testing in gamete donors (with Julia Mansour and Dr Lisa Dive).

Areas of supervision: Giselle welcomes research proposals focused on social research in digital identities and cultures; family relationships and practices; DNA and genetic testing/screening; reproductive health and donation.

Giselle is a member of the School of Communication and Arts HDR Committee.

Teaching

Giselle has coordinated and lectured across undergraduate and postgraduate programs in courses in humanities, social sciences and health. She has delivered guest lectures to students of Masters of Public Health on 'Digital Methods' and to Master of Diagnostic Genomics on 'Direct-to-consumer genetic testing’. She was course coordinator for COMU2030 Communication Research Methods in 2023, lecturer in HHSS6000 HASS Honours Research Design in 2024 and HHSS6040 Honours Research Design in Arts and Culture in 2025 and will continue in 2026.