About me

I am currently a Senior Lecturer in the Media, Film and Communication programme at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. I also serve as one of the co-directors of Kōtaha - The Internet, Social Media and Politics Research Lab (ISPRL) at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University of Wellington in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Academic History

I have presented at conferences in North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, including SIGGRAPH, the annual conference for the Society for Animation Studies, the annual conference for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), and the annual conference of the German Communication Association (DGPuK). I have also written editorials for sites such as Newsroom and made media appearances in Idealog, Stuff and The New Zealand Herald, and on Radio New Zealand, 3news, and Consumer NZ’s podcast series Consume This.

I earned my B.A. in Telecommunications (with a Psychology minor) from Indiana University (Bloomington) in 2000. After working as a web and multimedia developer for a few years, I returned to school, earning my M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from Indiana University (Indianapolis) in 2005 and a PhD in Media Studies from the University of Western Ontario in 2011 in London, Ontario, Canada. While there, I worked as a Lecturer and then Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Media and Information Studies before accepting the position at Victoria University of Wellington in 2013. After nine years there, I worked as a Senior Policy Advisor at InternetNZ and as a Senior Policy Analyst for the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs

Research Interests

My current research projects examine topics such as financial transactions on mobile social networking apps, international content regulation frameworks to combat violent extremism and hate speech, and the networking of white extremism. I am also interested in disinformation and 'fake news', media and activist movements, mediatisation, digital labour, visual culture, media aesthetics, and the political economy of media.

My doctoral dissertation, Immediacy and Aesthetic Remediation in Television and Digital Media: Mass Media's Challenge to the Democratization of Media Production, investigated television's appropriation of the aesthetics of user-produced content distributed on the Internet, and the social, cultural, and political reasons for, and implications of, this appropriation. I undertook case studies of animation and reality media in an attempt to understand the role immediacy plays in television's adaptation of new media aesthetics and problematize the assumed "independent" nature of online media production.