Category Archives: social media and academia

Vitalities Lab Newsletter Number 2

VITALITIES LAB NEWSLETTER

Number 2, 29 April 2019

The Vitalities Lab is led by SHARP Professor Deborah Lupton, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre, UNSW Sydney. Further details here.

New Publications

 

Presentations

 

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Deborah speaking at the CSRH seminar series

  • Deborah Lupton: ‘The internet both reassures and terrifies’: using the story completion method for health research. Presentation for the Centre for Social Research in Health Seminar Series, 2 April 2019
  • Deborah Lupton: ‘”Smart” health promotion: a perspective from digital sociology’. Invited presentation at a sub-plenary on smart health promotion, International Union for Health Promotion and Education World Conference, Rotorua, New Zealand, 10 April 2019
  • Deborah Lupton: ‘The more-than-human worlds of self-tracking for health and fitness’. Keynote at the World Congress of the Sociology of Sport, Dunedin, New Zealand, 24 April 2019
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The campus at the University of Dunedin, where Deborah gave a keynote

 

Upcoming events

  • 6 May: Deborah will be holding a  Vitalities Lab in-house pop-up methods workshop using the ‘New Metaphors’ inspiration cards
  • 7 May: Deborah is presenting a workshop on ‘Increasing your academic visibility’. Registration is free and open to all. Further details here.
  • 13 May: Deborah is the convenor and one of the panel speakers at the UNSW Grand Challenges Event ‘Shaping our digital future’. Registration is free and open to all. Further details here.

Opportunities

  • The Vitalities Lab has a doctoral research stipend worth $30,000 annually for four years for a domestic candidate who meets UNSW Sydney requirements for doctoral admission and wishes to pursue a project related to the Lab’s research directions. Contact Deborah Lupton (d.lupton@unsw.edu.au for further details).
  • Research practicums are also available for international doctoral students who are pursuing their studies at a university outside Australia to spend a period of time as a visiting researcher at the Vitalities Lab under Deborah Lupton’s supervision. Tuition fees apply. Further details are available here.

 

Ten tips for increasing your academic visibility

It is important that academic researchers draw attention to their research. We don’t engage in scholarship just for our own benefit. We want others to be aware of and use our research, including those outside the academy. Quite apart from the high value given to factors such as impact, stakeholder engagement and numbers of citations to your work, promoting goodwill and strong networks with your colleagues is important for your flourishing, including feeling part of a community and that you are making a difference.

Here are some ideas for increasing the visibility of your research to as great a range of publics as possible.

  1. Actively use social media: blog, tweet, sign up to Facebook groups of interest or make one of your own to bring like-minded researchers together. Use these networks to publicise your activities – including new publications, calls for papers, and event announcements. Be a good academic citizen and also publicise the outputs and activities of your colleagues – they will likely return the favour.
  2. Sign up to platforms such as ResearchGate and Academia.edu and maintain your profile, updating new publications on it. These platforms provide an easy way for people to request copies of your publications and for you to share them.
  3. Publish preprints and postprints in open access outlets such as your university e-repository, ResearchGate, Academia.edu, Social Science Research Network etc. This will make your work readily accessible for those who can’t access academic journals.
  4. Ensure that you have a Google Scholar profile that lists all your publications and citations. I can’t emphasise enough how important this is to make your publications and citations visible in one place. Google Scholar automatically links to all your open access publications as well, helping people to readily find your work. Important! – ensure that you check your profile regularly to weed out any inaccuracies that the Google Scholar algorithms may have created, such as not including a publication of yours or wrongly attributing someone else’s publications (and citations) to you. An inaccurate Google Scholar profile is not a good look, particularly if it appears that you are taking credit for someone else’s work.
  5. Sign up to Google Scholar alerts for your name – this will mean that every time you are cited, GS will email you a notification. This a fantastic way not only of seeing who is citing you but also how they are using and building on your work.
  6. Create some kind of web presence for your research projects, so that you can share updates, calls for participants, invite feedback on preliminary findings, announce events and list outputs (hopefully with as many as possible available in open access form). Consider including a section that provides resources such as links to other relevant websites and research groups, methods toolkits, curriculum ideas and reading lists.
  7. Take every opportunity to do interviews for mass media outlets and write pieces about your research for forums such as The Conversation.
  8. Make podcasts and videos to talk about your own research or interview other academics working in your area about their research.
  9. Don’t be afraid to self-cite in your publications (particularly if you are female – research shows that women academics are far less likely to cite their own work than are men).
  10. Use a platform like Slideshare to publish your presentation slides.

Edited to add: Also be aware that at times, increased visibility can bring with it unwanted negative attention, particularly if you research contentious or controversial topics that bring out the trolls, and if you are identify with a marginalised or vulnerable social group. If this is you, be careful in your choices about how to communicate your research publicly. (Thanks to Emma Renold for drawing attention to these issues when commenting on this post.)

My 2017 publications

Books

Lupton, D. (2017) Digital Health: Critical and Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Lupton, D., Mewburn, I. and Thomson, P. (eds) (2017) The Digital Academic: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technologies in Higher Education. London: Routledge.

Lupton, D. (editor) (2017) Self-Tracking, Health and Medicine: Sociological Perspectives. London: Routledge.

Special journal issues edited

‘Health, medicine and self-tracking’, Health Sociology Review (volume 26, issue 1), 2017 (also published as a book)

‘Digital media and body weight’, Fat Studies (volume 6, issue 2), 2017

‘The senses and digital health’, Digital Health (volume 3), 2017

Book chapters

Lupton, D. (2017) 3D printed self replicas: personal digital data made solid. In McGillivray, D, Carnicelli, S. and McPherson, G. (eds), Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 26—38. (PDF Lupton 2017 3D self-replicas chapter).

Gard, M. and Lupton, D. (2017) Digital health goes to school: digitising children’s bodies in health and physical education. In Taylor, E. and Rooney, T. (eds), Surveillance Futures: Social and Ethical Implications of New Technologies for Children and Young People. London: Routledge, pp. 36—49. (PDF Gard Lupton 2017 digital health goes to school chapter)

Lupton, D. (2017) Digital bodies. In Silke, M., Andrews, D. and Thorpe, H. (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Physical Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, pp. 200—208. (PDF Lupton 2017 digital bodies chapter)

Lupton, D. (2017) Personal data practices in the age of lively data. In Daniels, J., Gregory, K. and McMillan Cottom, T. (eds), Digital Sociologies. London: Policy Press, 335—350. (PDF Lupton 2017 personal data practices in the age of lively data chapter)

Lupton, D., Mewburn, I. and Thomson, P. (2017) The digital academic: identities, contexts and politics. In Lupton, D., Mewburn, I. and Thomson, P. (eds), The Digital Academic: Critical Perspectives on Digital Technologies in Higher Education. London: Routledge, 1-19. (PDF Lupton Mewburn Thomson 2017 digital academic chapter)

Lupton, D. (2017) Cooking, eating, uploading: digital food cultures. In LeBesco, K. and Naccarato, P. (eds), The Handbook of Food and Popular Culture. London: Bloomsbury. (PDF Lupton 2017 cooking eating uploading chapter)

Journal articles

Lupton, D. and Williamson, B. (2017) The datafied child: the dataveillance of children and implications for their rights. New Media & Society, 19(5), 780—794.

Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D. and Heyes Labond, C. (2017) Mundane data: the routines, contingencies and accomplishments of digital living. Big Data & Society, 4(1), online, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2053951717700924

Thomas, G., Lupton, D. and Pedersen, S. (2017) ‘The appy for a happy pappy’: expectant fatherhood and pregnancy apps. Journal of Gender Studies, online ahead of print: doi:10.1080/09589236.2017.1301813

Lupton, D. (2017) How does digital health feel? Towards research on the affective atmospheres of digital health technologies. Digital Health, 3, online, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/eprint/ZCuMrRHMP3RsH9Z8f9v7/full

Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2017) ‘For me, the biggest benefit is being ahead of the game’: the use of social media in health work. Social Media + Society, 3(2), online, available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2056305117702541

Lupton, D. (2017) Digital media and body weight, shape and size: an introduction and review. Fat Studies, 6(2), 119-134.

Lupton, D. and Michael, M. (2017) ‘Depends on who’s got the data’: public understandings of personal digital dataveillance. Surveillance and Society, 15(2), 254—268.

Lupton, D. (2017) ‘It just gives me a bit of peace of mind’: Australian women’s use of digital media for pregnancy and early motherhood. Societies, 7(3), online, available at http://www.mdpi.com/2075-4698/7/3/25/htm

Lupton, D. and Maslen, S. (2017) Telemedicine and the senses: a review. Sociology of Health & Illness, 39(8), 1557-1571.

Lupton, D. (2017) Feeling your data: touch and making sense of personal digital data. New Media & Society, 19(10), 1599-1614.

Lupton, D. (2017) ‘Download to delicious’: promissory themes and sociotechnical imaginaries in coverage of 3D printed food in online news sources. Futures, 93, 44-53.

Lupton, D. (2017) Towards design sociology. Sociology Compass, online ahead of print: doi:10.1111/soc4.12546

Lupton, D. (2017) Digital health now and in the future: findings from a participatory design stakeholder workshop. Digital Health, 3, online, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2055207617740018

Pink, S., Sumartojo, S., Lupton, D. and Heyes Labond, C. (2017) Empathetic technologies: digital materiality and video ethnography. Visual Studies, 32(4), 371-381.

Editorials

Lupton, D. (2017) Towards sensory studies of digital health. Digital Health, 3, online, available at http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/2055207617740090

Lupton, D. (2017) Self-tracking, health and medicine. Health Sociology Review, 26(1), 1—5.

New edited book now out – The Digital Academic

9781138202580

 

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:

  1. The Digital Academic: Identities, Contexts and Politics: Deborah Lupton, Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson
  2. Towards an Academic Self? Blogging During the Doctorate: Inger Mewburn and Pat Thomson
  3. Going from PhD to Platform: Charlotte Frost
  4. Academic Persona: The Construction of Online Reputation in the Modern Academy: David Marshall, Kim Barbour and Christopher Moore
  5. Academic Twitter and Academic Capital: Collapsing Orality and Literacy in Scholarly Publics: Bonnie Stewart
  6. Intersections Online: Academics Who Tweet: Narelle Lemon and Megan McPherson
  7. Sustaining Asian Australian Scholarly Activism Online: Tseen Khoo
  8. Digital Backgrounds, Active Foregrounds: Student and Teacher Experiences with ‘Flipping the Classroom’: Martin Forsey and Sara Page
  9. 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
  10. Digital Methods and Data Labs: The Redistribution of Educational Research to Education Data Science: Ben Williamson
  11. Interview – Sara Goldrick-Rab with Inger Mewburn
  12. Interview – Jessie Daniels with Inger Mewburn

 

Review of Social Media for Academics

I have written many times on this blog about my own experiences of using social media and other digital tools for academic work and my research focusing on how other academics are doing this.

One of the people I have encountered along the way is Mark Carrigan, an early career British sociologist. Appropriately enough, we first met on Twitter a few years ago, around the time I began experimenting with various digital tools for professional purposes. Since then, we have had many discussions there and on other online forums, as well as by email, about using social media in universities (and a couple of in-person meetings as well). Mark has now written a book on Social Media for Academics. It is the first book I know of to present a ‘how-to’ manual combined with reflections on the wider implications of  academic social media engagement.

Mark is a great example of someone who has strategically used social media while still in the very early stages of his career (completing his doctorate) to create a high profile for his work. He has now built on this experience not only to work in various positions involving promoting academic journals, departments and organisations, but to produce this book. In its chapters, Mark employs a casual, chatty style to painlessly introduce readers to the art of academic social media.

The book is distinctive because Mark’s sociological training allows him to contextualise the social, cultural and political implications of academic social media use. Yes, he offers  a multitude of helpful tips and advice about how best to communicate online, what platforms and tools are the most effective, how to develop your own voice, how online engagement helps in promoting one’s research and reaching wider audiences outside academia, building networks, curating interesting material you have found on the internet, finding time to use social media and so on. But there are also reflections offered on what academic social media means for professional identities and for academic work in general. In addition there are many pithy remarks drawing on Mark’s observations, for example, of the awkwardness that sometimes accompanies the experience of colleagues meeting in the flesh after having developed a hitherto purely online relationship, or the potential pitfalls of live-tweeting conferences or writing a tweet or blog post in haste and anger that then becomes widely circulated well after the initial irritation has subsided.

This book is highly recommended for higher degree students and faculty staff members who are interested in the possibilities of academic social media for both research and teaching, as well as researchers interested in future directions for the university workplace and academic identities.

 

My publications for 2014

This the list of my publications that came out in 2014. If you would like a copy of any of the articles, please contact me on deborah.lupton@canberra.edu.au.

Books

Lupton, D. (2015) Digital Sociology (Routledge: this  has a 2015 publication date, but actually was published in November 2014).

Special Journal Issue

Editor of special issue on ‘Beyond techno-utopia: critical approaches to digital health technologies’, Societies (volume 4, number 2), 2014.

Book Chapters

Lupton, D. (2014) The reproductive citizen: motherhood and health education. In Fitzpatrick, K. and Tinning, R. (eds), Health Education: Critical Perspectives. London: Routledge, pp. 48—60.

Lupton, D. (2014) Unborn assemblages: shifting configurations of embryonic and foetal embodiment. In Nash, M. (ed), Reframing Reproduction: Conceiving Gendered Experiences. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Peer-reviewed Journal Articles

Lupton, D. (2014) ‘How do you measure up?’ Assumptions about ‘obesity’ and health-related behaviors in ‘obesity’ prevention campaigns. Fat Studies, 3(1), 32—44.

Lupton, D. (2014) The commodification of patient opinion: the digital patient experience economy in the age of big data. Sociology of Health & Illness, 36(6), 856—69.

Lupton, D. (2014) Precious, pure, uncivilised, vulnerable: infant embodiment in the Australian popular media. Children & Society, 28(5), 341—51.

Lupton, D. (2014) Quantified sex: a critical analysis of sexual and reproductive self-tracking apps. Culture, Health & Sexuality, online first, doi: 1080/13691058.2014.920528.

Lupton, D. (2014) Data assemblages, sentient schools and digitised HPE (response to Gard). Sport, Education and Society, online first, doi: 1080/13573322.2014.962496.

Lupton, D. (2014) Health promotion in the digital era: a critical commentary. Health Promotion International, online first, doi: 10.1093/heapro/dau091.

Lupton, D. (2014) Apps as artefacts: towards a critical sociological perspective on health and medical apps. Societies, 4, 606—22.

Lupton, D. (2014) Critical perspectives on digital health technologies. Sociology Compass, 8(12), 1344—59.

Editorials

Lupton, D. (2014) Beyond techno-utopia: critical approaches to digital health technologies. Societies, 4(4), 706—11.

Other Academic Publications

Lupton, D. (2014) Risk. In Cockerham, W., Dingwall, R. and Quah, S. (eds), The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior and Society. New York: Blackwell, pp. 2067—71.

Lupton, D. (2014) Feeling Better Connected’: Academics’ Use of Social Media. Canberra: News & Media Research Centre.

Digital Sociology now out

Digital Sociology has now been published (click here for the Amazon link and here for the publisher’s link).

 

The publisher’s blurb is below:

Digital Sociology

We now live in a digital society. New digital technologies have had a profound influence on everyday life, social relations, government, commerce, the economy and the production and dissemination of knowledge. People’s movements in space, their purchasing habits and their online communication with others are now monitored in detail by digital technologies. We are increasingly becoming digital data subjects, whether we like it or not, and whether we choose this or not.

The sub-discipline of digital sociology provides a means by which the impact, development and use of these technologies and their incorporation into social worlds, social institutions and concepts of selfhood and embodiment may be investigated, analysed and understood. This book introduces a range of interesting social, cultural and political dimensions of digital society and discusses some of the important debates occurring in research and scholarship on these aspects. It covers the new knowledge economy and big data, reconceptualising research in the digital era, the digitisation of higher education, the diversity of digital use, digital politics and citizen digital engagement, the politics of surveillance, privacy issues, the contribution of digital devices to embodiment and concepts of selfhood and many other topics.

Digital Sociology is essential reading not only for students and academics in sociology, anthropology, media and communication, digital cultures, digital humanities, internet studies, science and technology studies, cultural geography and social computing, but for other readers interested in the social impact of digital technologies.

Survey on academics’ use of social media

In January I conducted an online survey to find out how academics are using social media sites and tools. A total of 711 faculty members and postgraduate students completed the survey, mostly from the UK, Australia/New Zealand and North America.

The complete report can be accessed here.

Here is the abstract providing an overview of the findings:

This report outlines findings from an international online survey of 711 academics about their use of social media as part of their work conducted in January 2014. The survey sought to identify the tools that the respondents used, those they found most useful and the benefits and the drawbacks of using social media as a university faculty member or postgraduate student. The results offer insights into the sophisticated and strategic ways in which some academics are using social media and the many benefits they have experienced for their academic work. These benefits included connecting and establishing networks not only with other academics but also people or groups outside universities, promoting openness and sharing of information, publicising and development of research and giving and receiving support. While the majority of the respondents were very positive about using social media, they also expressed a range of concerns. These included issues of privacy and the blurring of boundaries between personal and professional use, the risk of jeopardising their career through injudicious use of social media, lack of credibility, the quality of the content they posted, time pressures, social media use becoming an obligation, becoming a target of attack, too much self-promotion by others, possible plagiarism of their ideas and the commercialisation of content and copyright issues. The report ends by contextualising the findings within the broader social and political environment and outlining areas for future research.

Chapter abstracts for my Digital Sociology book

I am pleased to announce that my latest book, Digital Sociology, has now gone into production with Routledge, and is due for publication around October this year. Here are the chapter abstracts to give some idea of the book’s contents.

1 Introduction: life is digital
In this introductory chapter I make an argument for why digital sociology is important and why sociology needs to make the study of digital technologies central to its very remit. It is argued that ubiquitous and mobile digital media have changed the ways in which social life is represented, conducted, monitored, managed and analysed. Digital technologies affect social relationships, concepts of identity and embodiment, the monitoring and organisation of people’s movements in space and the creation of and access to information and knowledge. I provide an overview of how digital sociology has developed and outline its four main aspects: professional digital use, analyses of digital technology use, digital data analysis, and critical digital sociology.

2 Theorising digital society
Chapter 2 provides a foundation for the ensuing chapters by reviewing the major theoretical perspectives that are developed in the book. The literature reviewed in the chapter is mainly drawn from sociology but also includes contributions from scholars in media and cultural studies, science and technology studies, surveillance studies, software studies and cultural geography. The perspectives that are discussed include analyses of the global information economy and new forms of power, the sociomaterial perspective on the relationship between humans and digital technologies, prosumption, neoliberalism and the sharing subject, the importance of the archive, theories of veillance (watching) that are relevant to digital society and theories concerning digitised embodiment.

3 Reconceptualising research in the digital era
Chapter 3 focuses on sociological and other social research in the digital era. The aim of the discussion is not to outline how to do digital research in detail. Rather I present an overview not only of some of the approaches that are available and their possibilities and limitations, but also of the more theoretical and critical stances that sociologists are taking to digital social research. I also devote attention to innovative ways of performing digital social research that are part of attempts to invigorate sociological research practice as a way of demonstrating the new and exciting directions in which sociology can extend in response to digital society.

4 The digitised academic
The higher education workplace has become increasingly digitised, with many teaching and learning resources and academic publications moving online and the performance of academics and universities monitored and measured using digital technologies. Some sociologists and other academics are also beginning to use social media as part of their academic work. In this chapter I examine the benefits and possibilities offered by digital technologies but also identify the limitations, drawbacks and risks that may be associated with becoming a digitised academic and the politics of digital public engagement.

5 A critical sociology of big data
Chapter 5 takes a critical sociological perspective on the big data phenomenon. The discussion emphasises that big data sets are systems of knowledge that are implicated in power relations. Big data are both the product of social and cultural processes and themselves act to configure elements of society and culture. They have their own politics, vitality and social life. Following an overview of the ways in which big data discourses and practices have achieved dominance in many social spheres, I discuss how digital data assemblages and algorithms possess power and authority, the metaphors used to describe big data and what these reveal about our anxieties and concerns about this phenomenon, big data hubris and rotted data and the ethical issues related to big data.

6 The diversity of digital technology use
Chapter 6 reviews research that has studied the use of digital technologies in different areas of the globe and how socioeconomic, cultural and political factors shape, promote or delimit the use of these technologies. I move from a discussion of the findings of large-scale surveys involving large numbers of respondents from specific countries or cross-nationally to in-depth qualitative investigations that are able to provide the detailed context for differences in internet use. The chapter shows that digital social inequalities are expressed and reproduced in a range of ways, including cultures of use as well as lack of access. Social inequalities and marginalisation may also be perpetuated and exacerbated online.

7 Digital politics and citizen digital public engagement
In Chapter 7 I examine the politics of digital veillance, activism, privacy debates, calls for openness of digital data and citizen digital public engagement. It is argued that while digital activism and moves to render digital data more open to citizens can be successful to some extent in achieving their aims, claims that they engender a major new form of political resistance or challenge to institutionalised power are inflated. Indeed digital technologies can provide a means by which activists can come under surveillance and be discredited by governments. Other negative aspects of citizen digital public engagement are outlined, including the ways in which the internet can incite discrimination and vigilantism and promote the dissemination of false information.

8 The digitised body/self
Chapter 8 addresses the ways in which digital software and hardware are becoming part of our identities as they store more data about our experiences, our social relationships and encounters and our bodily functioning. Digital sociologists and other digital media researchers have recognised the ways in which human embodiment and concepts of selfhood are represented and configured via digital technologies, digital data and digital social networks. It is not only the data or images produced via digital technologies that are important to research and theorise, but also how the objects themselves are used in practice. This chapter examines the incorporation of digital technologies into everyday lives across a range of contexts.