About

Dr Justine Humphry is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney and the Chief Investigator on the Emerging Online Safety Issues project. Her previous appointments include Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis at Western Sydney University (2014-2016) and Research Fellow of Digital Media at the University of Sydney (2013-2014). Justine researches the cultures and consequences of online, mobile and ‘smart’ data-driven platforms. She has extensive experience researching and building capacity in marginalised communities, having conducted qualitative research and co-design with homeless young people, families and single adults in Sydney and Melbourne for the Australian Communications Consumer Action Network (2013-14) and for the Young and Well Cooperative Research Centre (2015-16). She has worked with culturally and linguistically diverse communities in collaborative research of mobile anti-racism education strategies to develop digital antiracism strategies and competencies.

Justine’s research has contributed new evidence of the digital challenges of marginalised groups and mediated digital citizenship exploring issues of digital exclusion, datafication, surveillance and networked publics. She has presented her research at leading academic and policy fora, including the Australian Human Rights Commission. She has been cited in government policy submissions on welfare service reform and advised the Department of Communications and the Arts on the future of payphones. Justine has published widely in edited book collections and peer-reviewed high impact journals including New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society, Information, Communication & Society and the Journal of Urban Technology. She has received the university-wide Research Impact Competition Award at WSU (2015) and the University of Sydney-University of Glasgow Partnership Award (2019-2020).

Dr Olga Boichak is a Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney and a Chief Investigator on the Emerging Online Safety Issues project. She is a media sociologist with research interests spanning networks, narratives, and cultures of activism in the digital age. Before joining the University of Sydney in 2019, Olga was a visiting scholar at Ryerson University (Canada) and a research associate at the Center for Computational and Data Sciences (Syracuse University, USA), where she contributed to the development of tools and analytic techniques that support media literacy, social listening, and decision-making in complex scenarios. Prior to becoming an academic, she managed political campaigns in Ukraine and ran the Centre for Public Opinion Research (2005-2015), as well as served as Ukraine’s youth delegate to the United Nations (2014).

Boichak is the lead organiser of SICSS-Sydney, an international state-of-the-art training program in computational social science. She has a track record of publications on networked publics, transnational mobilisation, crowdsourcing, and algorithmic surveillance. She is an editor of the Digital War journal and is currently working on a project that explores diasporic humanitarianism and remote participation in homeland conflicts. Her work has appeared, among others, in Big Data & Society, International Journal of Communication, Global Networks, and Discourse, Context, and Media. She is the recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the Fulbright Fellowship (2014), International Communication Association’s Top Paper Award (2019), Higher Education Academy Fellowship (2021), and the University of Sydney SOAR Prize (2022-2023).

Dr Jonathon Hutchinson is a senior lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney and a Chief Investigator on the Emerging Online Safety Issues project. He is currently a Visiting Research Fellow on the Algorithmed Public Sphere project at the Hans Bredow Institute, Hamburg Germany. His research explores Public Service Media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated media, and algorithms in media. He is the NSW Representative on the Executive Committee for the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the Secretary for the International Public Service Media Association, RIPE, and is the current Program Chair for the Association of Internet Research (AoIR). Hutchinson is an award-winning author and his latest book is Cultural Intermediaries: Audience Participation and Media Organisations (2017), published through Palgrave Macmillan.