Lupton, D. (2023) The Internet of Animals: Human-Animal Relationships in the Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Lupton, D. (2023) Risk (revised 3rd edition). Abingdon: Routledge.
Book chapters
Pavlidis, A., Fullagar, S., Nichols, E., Lupton, D., Forsdike, K. and Thorpe, H. (2023) Experimenting with research creation during a pandemic: making time capsules with girls in sport. In Andrews, D., Thorpe, H. and Newman, J. (eds), Sport and Physical Culture in Global Pandemic Times: COVID Assemblages. Cham: Springer, pp. 241-267.
Journal articles
Baraitser, P. and Lupton, D. (2023) Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care. Culture, Health and Sexuality, 25(2), 192-205.
Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2023) The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method. Visual Studies, 38(3-4), 594-607.
Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2023) The materialities and embodiments of mundane software: exploring how apps come to matter in everyday life. Online Information Review, 47(2), 398-413.
Watson, A., Wozniak-O’Connor, V. and Lupton, D. (2023) Health information in creative translation: establishing a collaborative project of research and exhibition making. Health Sociology Review, 32(1), 42-59.
Lupton, D. (2023) Attitudes to COVID-19 vaccines among Australians during the Delta variant wave: a qualitative interview study. Health Promotion International, 38(1). Available online at https://doi.org/10.1093/heapro/daac192
Lupton, D. and Lewis, D. (2023) Australians’ experiences of COVID-19 during the early months of the crisis: a qualitative interview study. Frontiers in Public Health (11). Available online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2023.1092322
Lupton, D., Fuentes, A. and Mingo, EG. (2023) Presente y futuro da la sociologia digital: entrevista a Deborah Lupton. Teknokultura, 20(2), 239-242.
McLean, J., Southerton, C. and Lupton, D. (2023) Young people and TikTok use in Australia: digital geographies of care in popular culture. Social & Cultural Geography, online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2230943
Butler, E. and Lupton, D. (2023) Bubbles, fortresses and rings of steel: risk and socio-spatialities in Australians’ accounts of border controls during the COVID-19 pandemic. Social & Cultural Geography, online ahead of print. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2023.2240290
Lupton, D., Noremberg Schubert, Luz David, M.M., Coelho de Oliveira, D. Arthur Saldanha dos Santos, D.A. (2023) Entrevista com Deborah Lupton. Revista Cadernos de Campo, 23(1). Available online at https://periodicos.fclar.unesp.br/cadernos/article/view/18350
Boydell, K. and Lupton, D. (2023) Bearing witness poetically in a pandemic: documenting suffering and care in conditions of physical isolation and uncertainty. Medical Humanities, online ahead of print. Available online at https://doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2023-012768
Lupton, D. (2023) Sociocultural dimensions of health: contributions to studies on risk, digital sociology, and disinformation. Reciis: Revista Electronica de Comunicacao Informacao & Inovacao em Saude. 17(4). Available online at https://doi.org/10.29397/reciis.v17i4.4036
Lupton, D. (2022) COVID Societies: Theorising the Coronavirus Crisis. Abingdon: Routledge.
Edited books
Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (eds) (2022) Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge.
Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds) (2022) Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge.
Book chapters
Lupton, D. (2022) The sociology of mobile apps. In Rohlinger, D. and Sobieraj, S. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. New York: Oxford, pp. 197-218.
Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (2022) Thinking, making, doing, teaching and learning: bringing creative methods into health education. In Lupton, D. and Leahy, D. (eds), Creative Approaches to Health Education: New Ways of Thinking, Making, Doing, Teaching and Learning. Abingdon: Routledge.
Lupton, D. (2022) Data: the futures of personal data. In The Routledge Handbook of Social Futures. London: Routledge, pp. 117-125.
Lupton, D. (2022) Digital health. In Monaghan, L. and Gabe, J. (eds), Key Concepts in Medical Sociology, 3rd edition. London: Sage, pp. 241-246.
Lupton, D. (2022) The sociomaterial nature of the body and medicine. In Scrimshaw, S., Lane, S., Rubenstein, R. and Fisher, J. (eds), Handbook of Social Studies in Health and Medicine, 2nd edition. Thousand Oaks, California: Sage, pp. 103-121.
Lupton, D. and Southerton, C. (2022) Beyond ‘wicked Facebook’: a vital materialism perspective. Emotional Landscapes, Dystopia and Future Imaginaries. In McKenzie, J. and Patulny, R. (eds). Bristol: Bristol University Press, pp. 34-51.
Lupton, D., Clare, M. and Southerton, C. (2022) Digitized and datafied embodiment: a more-than-human approach. In The Palgrave Handbook of Critical Posthumanism, edited by Herbrechter, S., Callus, I., Rossini, M., Grech, M., de Bruin-Molé, M. and Müller, C.J. Houndmills: Palgrave, pp. 1-23.
Pink, S., Ruckenstein, M., Berg, M. and Lupton, D. (2022) Everyday automation: setting a research agenda. In Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 1-19.
Lupton, D. (2022) The quantified pandemic: digitised surveillance, containment and care in response to the COVID-19 crisis. In Pink, S., Berg, M., Lupton, D. and Ruckenstein, M. (eds), Everyday Automation: Experiencing and Anticipating Emerging Technologies. Abingdon: Routledge, pp. 59-72.
Southerton, C., Clark, M., Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) The futures of qualitative research in the COVID-19 era: experimenting with creative and digital methods. In Matthewman, S. (ed), A Research Agenda for COVID-19 and Society. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 155-174.
Lupton, D. (2022) Health zines: hand-made and heart-felt. In The Routledge Handbook of Health and the Media, edited by Lester Friedman and Therese Jones. New York: Routledge.
Peer-reviewed journal articles
Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2022) ‘The day everything changed’: Australians’ COVID-19 risk narratives. Journal of Risk Research, 25(10), 1147-1160.
Lupton, D. (2022) ‘Next generation PE?’ A sociomaterial approach to digitised health and physical education. Sport, Education and Society, 27(5), 516-528.
Lupton, D. and Lewis, D. (2022) Coping with COVID-19: the sociomaterial dimensions of living with pre-existing mental health illness during the early stages of the coronavirus crisis. Emotion, Space & Society, 42. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2021.100860
Lupton, D. and Lewis, S. (2022) Sociomaterialities of health, risk and care during COVID-19: experiences of Australians living with a medical condition. Social Science & Medicine, 293. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.114669
Baraitser, P. and Lupton, D. (2022) Photodiagnosis of genital herpes and warts: a sociomaterial perspective on users’ experiences of online sexual health care. Culture, Health and Sexuality, online first.
Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) Remote fieldwork in homes during the COVID-19 pandemic: video-call ethnography and map drawing methods. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 21. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2022.2043774
Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2022) The presence and perceptibility of personal digital data: findings from a participant map drawing method. Visual Studies, online first.
Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2022) ‘What happens next? Using the story completion method to surface the affects and materialities of digital privacy dilemmas. Sociological Research Online, 27(3), 690-706.
Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2022) Research-creations for speculating about digitised automation: bringing creative writing prompts and vital materialism into the sociology of futures. Qualitative Inquiry, 28(7), 754-766.
Lupton, D.(2022) Understandings and practices related to risk, immunity and vaccination during the Delta variant COVID-19 outbreak in Australia: an interview study. Vaccine: X, 11. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvacx.2022.100183
Clark, M. and Lupton, D. (2022) App stories: how mobile apps come to matter in everyday life. Online Information Review, online first.
Rich, E. and Lupton, D. (2022) How sociomaterial relations shape English secondary students’ digital health practices: beyond the promissory imaginaries. Social Science & Medicine, 311. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115348
Lupton, D. From human-centric digital health to digital One Health: crucial new directions for planetary health. Digital Health, 8. https://doi.org/10.1177/20552076221129103
Lupton, D. (2022) Socio-spatialities and affective atmospheres of COVID-19: a visual essay. Thesis Eleven, 171(1), 36-65.
Pieter Claeszoon: ‘Still life with a skull and a writing quill’. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
After having published 20 academic books as author/co-author and a further ten edited/co-edited collections (see here for a complete list of my books), I’ve had quite a bit of experience in writing book proposals.
Here’s what I’ve learned about how to go about securing that contract.
What are publishers looking for?
Your book will need to fill a gap in the market. How to identify this ‘gap’? Publishers are always looking for the next big idea: this could be a new topic, an emerging theoretical approach or innovative research methods. The commercial appeal of your proposed book will never be far from their minds – they need to be able to make money from the book.
Your book can be based on your research project findings, your teaching content, the way you use social theory or your research methods – I have published books on all of these topics (sometimes combining two or more in the one book).
Ideas for edited collections are often initiated through your research networks or from themed symposia.
My ‘go to’ source of inspiration for new books is when I find myself thinking – “I would really like to read a book on this topic”. I only ever write books about ideas in which I am excited and interested to pursue at a book-length scale.
Once you have identifed ‘the gap’ in the market
Sound out the specialised commissioning editors with an email first to ‘pitch’ the idea and see if it has any prospects. Speak to publishers at their displays at conferences – they always ready to discuss ideas. Otherwise find the relevant commissioning editor’s email on the publisher’s website and contact them that way.
Consider your favourite books – who publishes them? Is there a book series into which your idea would fit well? Contact the editors of the book series (they are always academics) to sound out your ideas with them.
Ask a colleague who is an experienced author to give you some feedback on a draft proposal.
The book does not have to be written before you get a contract. In fact, it’s best if you don’t spend too much time on writing it before you have secured the contract.
What to put in the book proposal?
Look on publishers’ websites for advice and download any proposal information and forms. Many publishers have pro formas they want prospective authors to use for the proposal.
The proposal should usually include the following:
Brief overview of the book (why this book, why now, what will be the main themes of the book?)
Brief author/editor bio (why are you the ideal person to write/edit this book?)
If an edited book – brief bios of each of the contributors
Chapter titles and brief summary of chapter content (like abstracts)
Target market – who will want to buy and use this book?
Course adoption – what uni courses might suit adoption of the book? (Warning – textbooks will get more sales but fewer academic kudos)
Word count and timeline – realistically, when can you deliver the finished manuscript to the publisher?
Some publishers want to see some full chapter examples (particularly for first authors) – many don’t
What happens after you submit your proposal?
The proposal will be evaluated by the commissioning editor, who may ask for some tweaks. If they think it is a good idea, it will be sent out to external reviewers (other academics) for their views on whether it should be published. If these reviews are favourable, the commissioning editor will take your proposal to the publisher’s editorial meeting and present it for approval to issue a contract (you may be asked to tweak it again first).
If all goes well at this meeting, the publisher will offer you a contact – now the real hard work begins!
Lupton, D. (2020) The sociology of mobile apps. In Rohlinger, D. and Sobieraj, S. (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Sociology and Digital Media. New York: Oxford, online first.
Lupton, D. (2020) Thinking with care about personal data profiling: a more-than-human approach. International Journal of Communication, 14, 3165-3183, available online at https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/13540
Lupton, D. (2020) ‘Not the real me’: social imaginaries of personal data profiling. Cultural Sociology, online first. doi.org/10.1177/1749975520939779
Lupton, D. and Watson, A. (2020) Towards a more-than-human digital data studies: developing research-creation methods. Qualitative Research, online first. doi:org/10.1177/1468794120939235
Watson, A. and Lupton, D. (2020) Tactics, affects and agencies in digital privacy narratives: a story completion study. Online Information Review, online first. doi.org/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174
Watson, A., Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2020) Enacting intimacy and sociality at a distance in the COVID-19 crisis: the sociomaterialities of home-based communication technologies. Media International Australia, online first. doi: doi.org/10.1177/1329878X2096156
Reports
Rich, E., Lewis, S., Lupton, D. and Miah, A. (2020) Digital Health Generation? Young People’s Use of ‘Healthy Lifestyle’ Technologies. Bath: University of Bath, UK. Available at https://www.digitalhealthgeneration.net/final-report
Newman, C., MacGibbon, J., Smith, A. K. J., Broady, T., Lupton, D., Davis, M., Bear, B., Bath, N., Comensoli, D., Cook, T., Duck-Chong, E., Ellard, J., Kim, J., Rule, J., & Holt, M. (2020). Understanding Trust in Digital Health among Communities Affected by BBVs and STIs in Australia. Sydney: UNSW Centre for Social Research in Health. Available at http://doi.org/10.26190/5f6d72f17d2b5
Another initiative I undertook as a form of documentation of life during COVID in 2020 was using my smartphone to photograph everyday experiences from my own perspective and in the areas in which I live and work (in Sydney and Canberra). I’ve taken 100 photographs and have now uploaded them to Flickr as an open access resource, available for use under the Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC-BY-SA) license. Here’s just a small selection.
Sign in public toilet at UTS Sydney campus (December 2020)
Front page of The Canberra Times warning of ‘Christmas chaos’ due to outbreak of COVID on Sydney’s Northern Beaches (December 2020)
Sign on Sydney City train (December 2020)
Supermarket signs in Sydney City (July 2020)
Petrol station signs in Inner South Canberra (April 2020)
An empty Sydney Opera House forecourt during the first national lockdown (July 2020)
Toilet paper shortages in Coles, Inner South Canberra (April 2020)
Who doesn’t want more people to read and cite their work? Here’s some tips I have learnt along the way about what kind of publications attract attention and citations. They are most relevant for postgraduate students and academics in the humanities and social sciences.
1. Make sure you have a Google Scholar profile set up. People can then easily find your work all in one place. Google Scholar is much more inclusive of humanities and social sciences publications and citations than are the science-oriented citation databases such as Scopus or Web of Science.
2. Write books. My top-most cited publications are nine of my books. Some of these were published more than two decades ago and are still regularly cited.
3. Write about a diverse range of topics. This means a much wider readership for your work. It will also help keep you and your writing fresh and interesting, which in turn, will make you more interesting to your readers.
4. Publish in a wide range of journals. Ditto.
5. Be one of the first to write about a new topic or concept or apply a social theory in a new way. Get in early and you will become the ‘go to’ reference to cite.
6. Write ‘how to’ pieces. Here again, introductory publications that clearly outline how to apply a particular method or a new social theory will attract interest and attention.
7. Make your writing easily accessible: Use open access repositories such as your university’s e-repository or ResearchGate to publise your outputs and make them readily available to people. You can upload preprints or postprints of articles and book chapters, and ResearchGate makes it very easy for people to request a PDF of the published version and for you to supply it.
8. Use social media to spread the word about your new publications. Tweet, blog, notify Facebook special interest groups, make an introductory YouTube video.
9. If you write book chapters, make them readily available open access as soon as they are finalised. Book chapters can take ages to be published, but you can share preprints once they are ready and people can start citing them.
10. Be bold and take risks in your writing. Readers are attracted to new shiny things and will be more interested if you are trying to do something different or innovative.
I’ve published a number of posts over the years on this blog that have provided advice on how to undertake successful academic research. I’ve created a short PDF document that brings six of these posts together in the one place. It is available here: Lupton – Advice for Successful Academic Research.
This is the content of the PDF:
30 Tips for Successful Academic Research and Publishing
15 Top Tips for Revising Journal Articles
Ten Tips for Increasing Your Academic Visibility
Tips for Qualitative Researchers Seeking Funding – What Not to Leave Out of Your Grant Applications
Opening Up Your Research – Self-Archiving for Sociologists
A book I co-edited with Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson has now been published with Routledge, entitled The Digital Academic: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technologies in Higher Education. Here’s the link to the book on Amazon. We have wonderful contributions from researchers in Australia, the UK, Hong Kong, the USA and Canada.
This is the list of contents:
The Digital Academic: Identities, Contexts and Politics: Deborah Lupton, Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson
Towards an Academic Self? Blogging During the Doctorate: Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson
Going from PhD to Platform: Charlotte Frost
Academic Persona: The Construction of Online Reputation in the Modern Academy: David Marshall, Kim Barbour and Christopher Moore
Academic Twitter and Academic Capital: Collapsing Orality and Literacy in Scholarly Publics: Bonnie Stewart
Intersections Online: Academics Who Tweet: Narelle Lemon and Megan McPherson
Sustaining Asian Australian Scholarly Activism Online: Tseen Khoo
Digital Backgrounds, Active Foregrounds: Student and Teacher Experiences with ‘Flipping the Classroom’: Martin Forsey and Sara Page
A Labour of Love: A Critical Examination of the ‘Labour Icebergs’ of Massive Open Online Courses: Katharina Freund, Stephanie Kizimchuk, Jonathon Zapasnik, Katherine Esteves, Inger Mewburn
Digital Methods and Data Labs: The Redistribution of Educational Research to Education Data Science: Ben Williamson
It is grant reviewing season and I’ve been reading through some very interesting applications from some accomplished qualitative researchers in the social sciences and media studies. The rationale and background for projects are usually very well described and justified, as are the track records of the applicants.
But I’ve seen some common areas across several of the applications that need more detail. These are:
There is often not enough (or sometimes even any) information about the approach taken to analysing the qualitative data you are collecting. Simply saying you are ‘using NVivo to analyse the data’ and leaving it at that is not enough. NVivo seems to have become a magic word to use to explain and justify qualitative data analysis. But it is just a data management tool. I want to know what you are going to do with it. There are many approaches to analysing qualitative data. Which approach are you using? Have you had previous experience with this approach? Please justify the reason for your approach and provide some information about what you will be looking for in the data, and why.
If you are recruiting research participants for interviews, focus groups or other types of participation, please provide details of whether you have used your recruitment methods before and how successful they were. I know from experience that recruiting participants can be difficult and time-consuming, and achieving this successfully is crucial to the feasibility of your project. I would like you to explain to me more carefully how you are going to find people, and how you will keep them involved if they are required for more than one activity or you are asking them to be involved over quite a long time in the project.
This issue is particularly important if you are proposing to recruit hard-to-reach or marginalised social groups, and also high-status groups (such as busy professionals, for whom time is money). Here you need to provide even more information about how you will successfully recruit these participants and commit them to be involved. What will persuade them to be part of your study?
Which leads on to the ethics of recruiting participants from marginalised groups, or those you wish to engage in discussions about potentially distressing experiences. How will you persuade these people to want to speak to you? How will you protect them from harm, if you are raising sensitive and distressing issues and inviting them to discuss them with you? How will you protect yourself and other researchers involved in the project from the distress you may yourselves feel at discussing sensitive and very personal issues which may be very sad or otherwise confronting for all involved? I am concerned to see that often these very important issues are not discussed in enough detail, or are even glossed over, as if the applicants do not consider them important or have not considered their implications.
Many qualitative researchers now make statements suggesting that their research will have impact outside universities. Yet here again, often not enough fine details are provided to convince assessors and funders how feasible these claims are. Please tell us more about how this impact will be achieved.
And finally … many major funding bodies now mandate that the publications generated from the projects they fund should be made available open access. Yet very few qualitative researchers demonstrate any awareness of this, or describe how they will meet these requirements. Here again, more detail is required. Will you be depositing your publications into your university’s e-repository? Will you need to ask for funding in your budget to pay journals to publish your accepted manuscript as open access? Please explain your strategy.
Take a deep breath. No-one likes to have their precious writing critiqued, and it can be very easy to feel defensive and annoyed. But remember a condition of academic writing is that we expose ourselves to critique. We must learn to accept this and realise how the review process can help us.
Feel gratitude for the work performed on your behalf by the reviewers and editors. Although you may not like some of their feedback, nearly all (and yes, there are some nasty exceptions) have reviewed your work in the spirit of academic generosity and have taken precious time from their own work to do this. If they have performed the review constructively, they deserve your thanks and appreciation.
See the revision process as a way to make your work the best it can be, and a challenge to push yourself to improve it.
If the editor has given you a decision of ‘revise and resubmit’, always attempt this, however extensive the work required of you. There is a very good chance that if you revise your article competently it will be accepted.
If the editor has rejected your article, acknowledge your inevitable feelings of disappointment and frustration (or even murderous rage!) but then move on. Think about where else you can resubmit it. Consider first the comments made by the reviewers and decide whether you should address some of these before submitting elsewhere to enhance your chances of success next time around.
Bite the bullet. Try not to leave the revisions or submission to another journal too long – it can be easy to keep putting this job off, but it must be done!
If the article has been written with other authors, decide who will take leadership on the revisions. This should usually be the person who led the writing of the original manuscript. The lead author should take on as much of the revision work as they can, and then share the revised version with the other author/s for their contributions and feedback.
Block out a good chunk of time in which you will be able to begin work on the revisions. Choose a time of day if possible at which you know you will be feeling the most mentally alert. There is no denying that you have a demanding task ahead of you.
Don’t rush things. Take as much time as you need to complete it properly.
Now that you are mentally prepared … go back and read your submitted manuscript. You will most likely have forgotten most of what you wrote and this is a good chance to read it with fresh eyes.
Then go back to the email from the journal editors with the reviewers’ comments. Copy and paste the reviewers’ comments in to a new Word document. Then go through and isolate each comment which suggests or requests a revision. Then read each comment carefully.
Start to go through your original manuscript and begin addressing those points you think require revisions. It is often easiest to address the minor revisions first. In your ‘response to reviewers’ document, write your responses under each separate point as you go. Your response should explain the changes you have made. If you disagree with a suggested change, you are entirely within your rights to state this and explain why.
Highlight changes in your manuscript with bold or coloured highlighting so that the editor and reviewers can easily see where you added or significantly altered material. Don’t use the track changes function (unless this has been specifically requested by the editor), as track changes can leave the manuscript looking very messy and difficult to read.
Once you think you have conducted the revisions to the best of your ability, put the revised version aside for at least a day. Come back to it and read it through again. Read your ‘response to reviewers’ document again. Make any further changes you deem necessary.
Take another deep breath … and resubmit your article. Good luck!
This Sociological Life 