Dr Tim Highfield is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, where his fellowship project is Visual Cultures of Social Media. He is the author of Social Media and Everyday Politics (Polity, 2016), which brings together his PhD and postdoctoral research into politics, popular culture, digital and social media, play and irreverence, activism, and Eurovision.
His research examines how the everyday and the digital, the popular and the political, the silly and the serious are interlinked; his interests include the everyday practices of popular social media, and how formats and styles from animated GIFs to humorous hashtags and joke forms are used to engage with topics ranging from the explicitly political to the mundane and personal.
His research covers diverse topics and platforms, from visual social media such as GIFs and emoji, parody accounts and jokes on Twitter, fandom, identity on Instagram (including in collaboration with Dr Tama Leaver at Curtin University), online news and political commentary from blogs to everyday social media (including through hashtags and wordplay and through the visual), and social movements’ use of digital technologies in the US and Greece (with Dr Sky Croeser at Curtin University).
In 2017, he was the coordinator of the first DMRC Summer School, which saw 37 PhD and early-career researchers from 11 countries come to QUT for a week of intensive workshops and sessions led by DMRC researchers. He is also part of three of the four programs in the DMRC: Journalism, public communication and democracy; Digital media in everyday life; and Digital methods, where his work with Dr Leaver on Instagrammatics and researching visual social media more broadly a leading contribution to this field.
Dr Highfield is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers, International Communication Association, and Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and a program committee member for the Social Media and Society conference. More information about his work can be found at http://timhighfield.net or on Twitter (@timhighfield).
This information has been contributed by Dr Tim Highfield.
