Natalie Ann Hendry – författare

Launched in 2007, tumblr became a safe haven for LGBT youth, social justice movements, and a counseling station for mental health issues. For a decade, this micro-blogging platform had more users than either Twitter or Snapchat, but it remained an obscure subculture for nonusers.

Katrin Tiidenberg, Natalie Ann Hendry, and Crystal Abidin offer the first systematic guide to tumblr and its crucial role in shaping internet culture. Drawing on a decade of qualitative data, they trace the prominent social media practices of creativity, curation, and community-making, and reveal tumblr’s cultlike appeal and position in the social media ecosystem. The book demonstrates how diverse cultures can – in felt and imagined silos - coexist on a single platform and how destructive recent trends in platform governance are. The concept of “silosociality” is introduced to critically re-think social media, interrogate what kinds of sociality it affords, and what (unintended) consequences arise.

This book is an essential resource for students and scholars of media and communication, as well as anyone interested in an influential but overlooked platform.

Data excess — particularly in digital media research — is inevitable. It emerges as the ‘debris’ and ‘leftovers’ from planning, fieldwork and writing; the words cut from drafts and copied to untouched and forgotten files; digital metadata automatically recorded to databases; the data archived but never analysed or published. What do or can we do with this excess from our research?

Thinking beyond academic constraints and the constant push towards the next new fundable thing, Data Excess in Digital Media Research explicitly engages with data that has been left behind, ignored, obscured or even ‘written out’ of research publications. Positioning ‘excess’ as a conceptual, methodological, ethical and pragmatic challenge and opportunity, the authors in this edited collection examine what can happen when media researchers return to their surplus archives and develop new knowledge from what would otherwise be under-explored excess.

Provoking an ethical reconsideration of what we do, or do not do, with excess data, this is a call to action for researchers and scholars to rethink how they conduct their research as the consequences of datafication grow ever more central to both our academic endeavours and our lives.

Data excess — particularly in digital media research — is inevitable. It emerges as the ‘debris’ and ‘leftovers’ from planning, fieldwork and writing; the words cut from drafts and copied to untouched and forgotten files; digital metadata automatically recorded to databases; the data archived but never analysed or published. What do or can we do with this excess from our research?

Thinking beyond academic constraints and the constant push towards the next new fundable thing, Data Excess in Digital Media Research explicitly engages with data that has been left behind, ignored, obscured or even ‘written out’ of research publications. Positioning ‘excess’ as a conceptual, methodological, ethical and pragmatic challenge and opportunity, the authors in this edited collection examine what can happen when media researchers return to their surplus archives and develop new knowledge from what would otherwise be under-explored excess.

Provoking an ethical reconsideration of what we do, or do not do, with excess data, this is a call to action for researchers and scholars to rethink how they conduct their research as the consequences of datafication grow ever more central to both our academic endeavours and our lives.

This interdisciplinary volume examines the social production of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand). It draws together cutting-edge critical mental health scholarship from the region, to interrogate how personal, community, institutional and mediated relations, make and remake experiences of ‘mental health.’

In the wake of the widespread insertion of psy-considerations into everyday lives, here contributors demonstrate how the relations between communities, practices, professionals and institutions often replicate long-standing histories of discrimination and violence motivated by psychiatric classification, even as the psy-disciplines move into supposedly more transformational domains: digital technology, schooling, human resources, and social media, for example.

The book’s chapters reflect the current diversity within academic studies of mental health and illness in Australia and Aotearoa. This includes a wide range of case studies from war trauma in the Australian military and pornography addiction, to the depathologisation of trans health and peer workers in mental health services.

Critical Mental Health in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand offers unique insights particular to the region, to students and scholars of critical psychology, history, sociology, medical humanities, and education.