Professor Terry Flew

Background

Terry Flew is Professor of Media and Communications in the Creative Industries Faculty at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. From 2001-2006, he was the Head of Media and Communication in the Creative Industries Faculty, and from 2006-2008 was Head of Postgraduate Studies. After a period as a Research Chair from 2009-2010, he became Acting Portfolio Director for Portfolio 2 – Fashion, Journalism, Media and Communication in January 2011.

He has been seconded from QUT to act as  a Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission from May 2011 to February 2012, chairing the Inquiry into the National Classification Scheme in Australia. This inquiry will be reviewing censorship and classification standards in Australia in the context of media convergence and ubiquitous access to high-speed broadband services, and will make reocmmendations to the Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, and the Minister for Home Affairs, Brendan O’Connor, by 31 January 2012.

He is President of the Australian and New Zealand Communications Association, having previously been ANZCA Vice-President and Treasurer. He organised the ANZCA09: Communications, Creativity and Global Citizenship, the 2009 Annual Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Communications Association, held at QUT from 8-10 July 2009.

He has a wide range of research interests and research experience, and has been an author of three books, eight research monographs, 32 book chapters, 54 refereed academic journal articles, and has been an editor of nine special issues of academic journals and refereed conference proceedings.

He is the author of Australia’s leading new media textbook, New Media: An Introduction. New Media was first published by Oxford University Press in December 2002, with the second edition published in January 2005. The third edition was published in January 2008, with substantially new material and the inclusion of interviews and case studies. New Media: An Introduction has sold almost 10,000 copies over its three editions.

His second book, Understanding Global Media, was published by Palgrave in March 2007. It has been translated into Arabic and Polish. His most recent book, The Creative Industries, Culture and Policy, will be published by Sage in November 2011.

He has also contributed book chapters to leading international publications such as Dewesternising Media Studies (eds. J. Curran and M.-J. Park, Routledge, 2000), Handbook of New Media (eds. L. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone, Sage, 2002), Creative Industries (ed. J. Hartley, Blackwell, 2005), and Managing Media Work (eds. M, Deuze, 2010). He has also been published in first-tier scholarly international academic journals such as Media, Culture and Society, International Journal of Cultural Policy, Television and New Media, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies and International Journal of Cultural Studies.

Terry Flew has been engaged with projects that have received over $4 million in research funding, including $3.75 million in national competitive grant funding. He has been actively involved in three major collaborative projects that have been among the first of their kind in the arts and humanities in Australia: the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, the ARC Cultural Research Network, and the Smart Services Co-operative Research Centre.

He was First Chief Investigator on an ARC Linkages-Projects Grant titled “Investigating Innovative Applications of Digital Media for Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement in Australian Public Communication”. The industry partners on this ‘citizen journalism’ project were the Special Broadcasting Service, Cisco Systems Australia and The National Forum (publishers of On Line Opinion). The project web site you decide 2007, developed for the 2007 Australian Federal election, was identified by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy as an exemplar of community engagement in the digital economy. He has also led a three-year ARC Discovery-Project, “Creative Suburbia”, looking at networking patterns of creative workers in Austrlaia’s outer suburban communities, with researchers from QUT and Monash University.

He is a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), engaged with the Asian Creative Transformations and Media Ecologies and Methodological Innovation programs. The CCI is the first ARC Centre of Excellence in the arts and humanities in Australia. He is also a Work Program leader in New Media Services for the Smart Services Co-operative Research Centre where he has worked with leading industry partners including Fairfax Digital.