Register of research supervisors
School of Communication
The research interests of the staff as described below indicate the range of expertise in the School available for the supervision of research degree students.
Associate Professor Peter Bishop is Associate Professor, Communication Studies. His emphasis in teaching and research has been on the relationship between cultural and communication issues. He is particularly interested in the impact of high-tech communications both on notions and experience of place and text. He is currently researching representations both of Tibet and of Australia in terms of media, popular culture, promotion, travel and transportation.
Associate Professor Geraldine Bloustien is a senior lecturer in Communication Studies and Media Production. Her teaching and research background has been in Media Studies, Education & Aboriginal Studies within the disciplines of Communication Studies, Anthropology and Women's Studies. Her on-going research and publications have been in the areas of gender, issues of representation, visual communication & ethnographic methodologies. Her particular research interests and expertise are in the areas of film theory, education, popular music, youth cultures and new technologies of communication.
Dr Joy Chia is a Senior Lecturer in Public Relations and communication ethics. My teaching and research background has been in relationship management and new technology practice. Joy is a member of the national education committee of the Public Relations Institute of Australia (PRIA), and is in charge of the accredited public relations programs in 16 Australian universities.
Dr Jacqueline Cook is a Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies and Journalism. She is currently working on the formatting and stylisation of radio, especially commercial talkback, alternative “youth’ comedy shifts, and radical programming on community radio. She is continuing an ongoing research and publications project on Australian television comedy, and has an interest in the cultural analysis of activities involving the new communications technologies. Her emphasis has been on the gendered use of electronic communications media, and she has particular experience in qualitative and interpretive textual analysis.
Dr Vicki Crowley is a Senior Lecturer, and teaches and researches in the fields of cultural studies and gender studies. Her research and publishing has focussed on questions of identity and subjectivity especially as they are configured and practiced across sexualities, 'race' and gender. Recently she has focussed on practices such as 'drag' and explored the ways in which its performance and performativity disturb the heteronormalising effects of the gender binary.
Dr Ingrid Day is a Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies. Her main research and teaching interests involve the use of new technologies in teaching and learning and the internationalisation of learning through the use of technology. Her research interests also include print media and the socialisation of readers. She also developed the Magnet Multimedia Channel for the School of Communication which showcases the outstanding work of students in the areas of Journalism, Media Production, Professional Writing, Communication Studies, Multimedia and Library & Information Studies.
Dr Julia de Roeper is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Communication. Julia spent ten years working as an administrator in the live performing arts before commencing work in the film and television industry in 1989. She then worked as a producer for five years before joining the South Australian Film Corporation as Marketing Manager. She was subsequently appointed Director of Industry Development, a position she held for four years until leaving to undertake a PhD in 2000. Dr. de Roeper currently holds a position as lecturer in the School of Communication, Information and new Media at the University of South Australia.
Dr Jean Duruz is a Senior Lecturer, and teaches and researches in the fields of cultural studies and gender studies. She has an established history of researching memory, femininity and consumption within the Australian ‘suburban dream’ of the 1950s and 1960s. Recently, she has focused on nostalgia in relation to sites of everyday contemporary culture - houses, gardens, food and travel - and on the connections of food, identity and urban spaces. The city as a site for negotiating meanings, rituals and practices has become a particular interest.
Associate Professor Michael Galvin is Associate Professor in Communication Studies and former Head of School, Communication, Information and New Media. In recent years, his publication and research interests have focussed on narrative theory and postmodernism, communication as a field of study, and trends and issues in emergent cyberculture.
Professor Kerry Green Professor Kerry Philip Green is Head of the School of Communication at the University of South Australia. He specialises in newspaper audience research, computer-assisted journalism, multimedia journalism, and news media organisation and management. As part of his research, Professor Green is the project leader of a Federal Government-funded project investigating Trauma and the Newsroom. The project conducts research into psychological trauma that difficult reporting assignments may cause to both journalists and their audience members. Professor Green also is part of a national research project, funded by the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, investigating the representation of ethnic diversity in Australia’s news media. He also is a member of the industry advisory panel to the Federal Government’s Mindframe project on suicide and mental health, and works with the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA).
Professor Green has a background in the print media, with experience as a daily newspaper editor in Queensland. He holds a PhD in journalism from the University of Queensland, a Masters degree in Journalism and bachelor degrees in Economics and Arts.
Dr Adrian Guthrie is a Senior Lecturer in drama. Adrian is a writer with a background in painting and music. He began the Claremont Theatre Centre and Theatre School in South Yarra in 1972. Within this organisation he brought together a group of daring performers committed to exploring experimental theatre in those exciting days of the ‘new Australian theatre’. Adrian’s career has continued to encompass teaching and theatre-making; maintaining his primary interest in investigating theatre forms and the interplay of visual, musical and narrative elements in live performance. He is currently concerned with the mediation of live performance, and the conceptual significance of the many new modes of delivery that include the internet, wireless networks and portable receivers like iPods, mobile phones and hand-held computers. Adrian set up an innovative theatre program at the University of Western Sydney Macarthur. He was the leader of the full-time Single Honours Drama and Theatre Studies program at University College Chester in the UK, where he also initiated the degree in Arts and Cultural Management and contributed to setting up the Media for Performance degree program. He has taught at NIDA, University of Newcastle, and in many community contexts, including the NSW Theatre of the Deaf, St. Martin's Theatre School, Media 156, Flemington Housing Commission high-rise towers, Monash, & LaTrobe University Unions, NSW English Teachers' Association, and the Workers' Education Association. Some current projects include: Artaud Live, Tempest/Lear (re)vision, Bosnia Dreaming.
Dr Jane Hiscock teaches in the area of communication and information management. Her research interests include cultural change and communication and knowledge management.
Dr Susan Luckman is a Senior Lecturer in Communication who teaches and researches in the fields of media and cultural studies. She has authored publications on youth cultural practices, new media, the Internet and advertising, digital music cultures, contemporary protest movements, subculture theory, cyberfeminism, and contemporary cultural studies. Her current research projects focus upon areas including: creative industries, employment culture and micro-entrepreneurialism; new technologies and cultural policy; and contemporary social dance. She is a Chief Investigator on the ARC Linkage Project: Creative Tropical City - Mapping Darwin’s Creative Industries which will improve our knowledge and understanding of the creative industries in Darwin. It will provide a strong evidence base for the development of policy options for growing the creative industries in Darwin, and it will interrogate national and international creative industry policy frameworks for their applicability to Darwin. She is also a member of the ARC Cultural Research Network and Co-Convenor of its ECR and Post-Graduate development Node.
Ms Susan Myburgh is a senior lecturer in the School. Her research currently focuses on information seeking behaviour in hypertext, networked environments. She teaches and researches in corporate information use environments, strategic information management, knowledge management, information architecture and design and information retrieval issues. Her ongoing work includes gender and technology relationship issues. She is widely published in all these areas.
Dr Margaret Peters is a Senior Lecturer in Communication Studies. She is currently researching the effects of globalisation and regionalisation on knowledge workers, with a particular emphasis on the local experiences of senior Australasian women executives. Workplace cultural and structural change and power/knowledge effects are of particular interest, as is the discursive construction of "the knowledge worker". Her emphasis is on textual analysis and her expertise is in socio-linguistics. She has been awarded a Hawke Institute Fellowship to study women in management in International Corporate environments. In 2000 she was awarded a two year ARC Spirt Grant to conduct ethnographic research with a colleague from UTS and with industry partners AMP, Westpac, NSW Public Service, WA Public Service, SA Public Service, Victorian Public Service, Queensland Public Service, and the 5 ATN Universities, into the structural, cultural and emotional shifts required for the retention and recruitment of senior women executives in the above named sites.
Dr Ioana Petrescu is a Lecturer in Professional Writing. She teaches courses in professional writing (editing, publishing and document design), creative writing (poetry, short story) and communication. Her areas of expertise are: writing (all aspects), editing and publishing, literary theory and criticism, and the sociology of writing (theory and practice of the relation author -- agent/PR -- editor -- publisher -- bookseller -- reader).
Professor Ian Richards is Professor of Journalism and chair of UniSA’s Human Research Ethics Committee. He is a UniSA Supported Researcher, a Key Researcher with the Hawke Research Institute for Sustainable Societies, and an Australian Research Council "Expert of International Standing". His research interest is journalism ethics, an area in which he has published widely. In April, 2008, he was one of 15 invited presenters at an international communication ethics colloquium in the US to mark the retirement of eminent scholar Clifford Christians from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He was an invited speaker at UNESCO’s “International Symposium on Media and Ethics” in Ankara, Turkey, in November, 2006, and one of 15 journalism educators and researchers invited to Paris, France, by UNESCO for the first "Experts' Consultative Meeting on Journalism Education" in December, 2005. He has been closely involved with the establishment of the Ethics Centre of South Australia, a collaborative venture between UniSA, Flinders University and the University of Adelaide. A former newspaper journalist, he has worked and studied in Australia and the United Kingdom, and since 2003 has been editor of Australian Journalism Review, Australia's leading refereed journal in the academic field of journalism.
Dr Paul Skrebels is a Senior Lecturer in Professional Writing and Communication. He has extensive experience in designing, teaching and administering subjects in professional writing, communication skills, language arts, and literature. His research interests include the nexus between war memoir and war fiction, the teaching of writing skills, communication in professional and workplace contexts, postmodernist literacy and cultural criticism for students, Shakespearean drama, writing for the screen and stage, and the discourse of history, particularly military history.
Dr Nigel Starck is a Senior Lecturer in Journalism and Communication Management. Dr Starck’s research is directed at international journalism history and practice. Within that field, his particular interest is biographical journalism – to the extent that he has been described by The Guardian (UK) as ‘the acknowledged world expert on the obituarist’s craft’. Prior to his university appointment, Dr Starck was a newspaper reporter and broadcaster. In television, he produced a national current affairs program and served a three-year appointment as an overseas correspondent. He maintains an active involvement in broadcasting as a specialist media commentator for a radio stations in the public and commercial sectors.
Dr Mia Stephens is a member of the Professional and Creative Communication team in the School of Communication at the Magill campus. The team had the honour to be joint recipients of the Prime Minister's Award for Tertiary Teaching in the year 2000. They had earlier received the University of South Australia good teaching award in 1998. Along with theoretical study in English literature, language and linguistics, she worked in the TESOL field, teaching the range of English as a Second and Foreign Language, Special Purposes, Academic Purposes and language teaching pedagogy. A wider range of communication disciplines were opened to her with Organisational Communication and an interest in computing which she put to use in her MA with a foray into lexicography. By this time her career had bifurcated and she had graduated in Natural Resources Management. Her lexicology concentrated on Environment and sustainability. Most of her publications are in the field of Environmental Communication and her PhD thesis, A Decent Writer: Professional Environmental Communication Among Professional Environmental Managers, ventured into communities of practice, knowledge management, and writing in the workplace. Recently however, her teaching and interest in contact linguistics, language and society, pragmatics, conversational analysis and spoken interaction analysis, have led to the publication of Fuse or fracture: English as a world lingua franca, co-edited with colleagues Ioana Petrescu and Ann Reu. From 2004-5, together with Ian Henschke, she wrote scripts and co-presented the Wordwise program on ABC Asiapacific TV for the Australian Broadcasting Commission Nexus Program.
Dr Denise Wood is a Senior Lecturer and is the Program Director responsible for the Bachelor of Arts (multimedia studies) major in the School of Communication. Denise is also a member of the University Working Party on Web accessibility and an online instructor in Web Accessibility for a Certificate Course offered through a US organisation (EASI) accredited through the University of Southern Maine. Denise has extensive experience in the multimedia industry as both a producer and training provider. Denise was a founding member of the Information Policy Advisory Council established by the Communications Minister in 1996 and the Director of OptCom SA Inc., an organisation specialising in multimedia production and training, from 1994 to 1997. Denise has undertaken research studies addressing the impact of technology in education and has published several articles on the findings from her research into the effects of feedback and reinforcement on learning. The knowledge Denise gained from her research has been applied to the instructional design of commercial packages published by the Education Department of Victoria and Jacaranda Publishers in 1984.
Professor Claire Woods is Professor, Communication and Writing, formerly Director of the Centre for Professional and Public Communication, Teaching Team leader in Professional Writing and Communication, and Director of International Programs in the School. Her research interests are in the teaching of writing and texts; ethnography of writing and literacies in professional and community contexts; issues qualitative research; communication in the workplace, writing creative non-fiction; and writing in research.