Benjamin Hanckel

Western Sydney University · Institute for Culture and Society (ICS)

This study examines how queer young people in Australia are engaging in an online community to address their marginalisation and oppression. Drawing on an analysis of online forums and in-depth interviews with 14 participants, we use Durkheim's concept of egoism and the social model of disability to analyse the role and impact of the online communi...

Queer youth face discourses that position their experiences as ‘wrong’ or ‘negative,’ which creates barriers to information and support. Whilst new information and communication technologies (ICTs) present opportunities to circumvent and challenge these barriers (Hillier et al 2010; Hanckel and Morris, 2014) less is known about how risk is conceptu...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and other non-heterosexual and gender diverse (LGBTIQ+) young people utilise a range of digital media platforms to explore identity, find support and manage boundaries. Less well understood, however, is how they navigate risk and rewards across the different social media platforms that are part...

Online video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube, afford queer young people new opportunities to document, discuss and explore sexuality and gender identity. However, there remains limited work undertaken on how these digital stories are produced for sites such as YouTube—“networked publics” (boyd, Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on...

Background: Existing evidence identifies health benefits for children of additional daily physical activity (PA) on a range of cardiovascular and metabolic outcomes. The Daily Mile (TDM) is a popular scheme designed to increase children's PA within the school day. Emerging evidence indicates that participation in TDM can increase children's PA, re...

This book has examined the logics and design processes of (trans)national digital wellbeing initiatives and their collisions with the (trans)national digital wellbeing practices of LGBT+ young people. Throughout this book I have followed the construction, implementation and impact of (trans)national digital wellbeing initiatives for LGBT+ youth and...

Making sense of how (trans)national digital wellbeing initiatives travel, and how they are implemented is critical in determining their impact on health and wellbeing. In this chapter I follow one (trans)national digital wellbeing initiative (introduced in Chap. 3) as it gets implemented across Southeast Asia. The initiative, being implemented acro...

This chapter examines the design of (trans)national digital wellbeing technologies for LGBT+ young people. In this chapter I focus on the design and development of one regional (trans)national digital wellbeing initiative for LGBT+ young people in Southeast Asia. The chapter interrogates the imagined (im)possibilities of the intervention, as well a...

This chapter examines the production and distribution of 7 digital stories, developed by LGBT+ young people across East and Southeast Asia. They were initiated and part of the (trans)national digital wellbeing initiative introduced in Chap. 3. In this chapter I examine their trajectory, from production to distribution, as they aim to impact local a...

This chapter begins with a historical account of the emergence of digital technologies in Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand), and the critical role they are playing for sexuality and gender diverse young people. As transnational digital technologies are employed by health services and used by young people...

This chapter explores internet engagement and use by LGBT+ young people in Southeast Asia. I draw on four vignettes of participants across Southeast Asia to examine how they incorporate digital spaces into their lives and why. Drawing on the capability approach I show in this chapter how digital spaces offer access to capabilities—(sub)cultural inf...

Emerging research points to the increasingly expansive ontologies of gender that young people engage with in contemporary society. This paper examines the representations of gender that emerged in one urban site: a science gallery exhibition in London that sought to de-centre fixed binary gender categories-a site where gender is explicitly being 'r...

Background Guidance and reporting principles such as CONSORT (for randomised trials) and PRISMA (for systematic reviews) have greatly improved the reporting, discoverability, transparency and consistency of published research. We sought to develop similar guidance for case study evaluations undertaken to explore the influence of context on the proc...

Social media practices are situated within the contexts that people are located in, including family and peer relationships. LGBTQIA+ young people carefully curate social media spaces to find similar others in careful ways. However, less is understood about how existing connections to families of origin (re)shape social media practices. Drawing on...

Case study methodology is widely used in health research, but has had a marginal role in evaluative studies, given it is often assumed that case studies offer little for making causal inferences. We undertook a narrative review of examples of case study research from public health and health services evaluations, with a focus on interventions addre...

Analysing survey data from 1,304 LGBTQ + young people in Australia collected in 2016, this paper considers key distinctions between the experiences of bisexual and pansexual participants, and lesbian and gay participants in relation to social media use and aspects of connection, harassment and mental health. Presenting quantitative data, illustrate...

Workplaces are increasingly looking to expand their equity and diversity work to understand how to address aspects of identity that intersect with gender or sexuality, and with genders and sexualities beyond binary (M/F) understandings. There are solid business and moral cases that can be made for this expansion. The Sexualities and Genders Researc...

Multimorbidity has become an increasingly prominent lens through which public health focuses on the ‘burden’ of ill health in ageing populations, with the promise of a more upstream and holistic approach. We use a situational analysis (drawing on documentary analysis and interviews with service providers, policy actors and people living with multip...

Accurate data collection from LGBTIQ+ communities is crucial for public health research and the provision of equitable services. Emergent fluid, multiple, trans and non-binary gender identities complicate data collection in ways that make an excellent case-study for rethinking the categorization of such data. In this article, we explore some of the...

This report outlines how children’s rights might be conceptualised in relation to digital health. It assesses the efficacy of existing digital health governance mechanisms in relation to protecting, respecting and remedying children’s rights, and identifies a range of issues where further deliberation and action are required.

Schools have long been sites of public health intervention on the bodies of children. Increasingly, these interventions also act on the bodies of educators. Our case study is an intervention focused on the future health of children’s bodies (‘The Daily Mile’), which, we argue, also resulted in the surveillance of educators’ bodies. We draw on Bourd...

As investing becomes more accessible for younger investors through emerging digital products and services, industry groups and regulation bodies are concerned about increasing numbers of inexperienced young adults starting to invest. Responses to these concerns have focused on media regulation and better financial education to address financial lit...

The following reports on one of the largest qualitative studies of sexuality and gender diverse young people and their use of social media platforms in Australia. This study had two broad aims: firstly, to better understand the ways sexuality and gender diverse young people are engaging with social media platforms, and secondly, using a rapid proto...

Background Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a method for identifying the configurations of conditions that lead to specific outcomes. Given its potential for providing evidence of causality in complex systems, QCA is increasingly used in evaluative research to examine the uptake or impacts of public health interventions. We map this emergi...

In this article, we examine the ways transitions are constructed and represented within healthcare settings vis-à-vis lived experiences. Drawing on in-depth interviews with transgender people and data from a document analysis, we examine how transgender peoples’ experiences fit within conceptualisations of transition(s) in healthcare guidance docum...

Background The need for better methods for evaluation in health research has been widely recognised. The ‘complexity turn’ has drawn attention to the limitations of relying on causal inference from randomised controlled trials alone for understanding whether, and under which conditions, interventions in complex systems improve health services or th...

This paper draws on the largest and most comprehensive Australian research to date that explores the campus climate for sexuality and gender diverse (SGD) people at one university. Using a mixed-method approach that incorporated an online survey open to all students and staff (n = 2395), face-to-face in-depth interviews with key stakeholders (n = 1...

Fear of heterosexism—as distinct from actual experiences of heterosexism—plays a significant role in staff and students lives on campus. Ambient workplace heterosexism provides a context for staff and students about what to expect from their peers and colleagues, and shapes the daily activities of those who perceive heterosexism as a regulating for...

Background: There is an increasing recognition that health intervention research requires methods and approaches that can engage with the complexity of systems, interventions, and the relations between systems and interventions. One approach which shows promise to this end is qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), which examines casual complexity...

For LGBTIQ+ people, the internet and social media are key channels for communicating and connecting with queer peers, and learning about queer life and queer experiences. While digital social spaces have evolved over the past 20 to 30 years, many of the motivations for using these platforms remain the same. This paper draws on data from the Scrolli...

This article explores LGBTIQ+ young people's use of Tumblr-a social media platform often associated with queer youth cultures. Drawing on data from surveys (N = 1,304) and interviews (N = 23) with LGBTIQ+ young people in Australia, we argue that existing notions of "queer community" through digital media participation do not neatly align with young...

Crowdsourcing practices have generated much discussion on their ethics and fairness, yet these topics have received little scholarly investigation. Some have criticized crowdsourcing for worker exploitation and for undermining workplace regulations. Others have lauded crowdsourcing for enabling workers' autonomy and allowing disadvantaged people to...

This chapter reflects on how ‘cyberqueer’ spaces - digitally mediated spaces inhabited by queer people - have changed and evolved over the past 20 years. In doing so, it explores the enduring significance of the Internet in the lives of young lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ+) people. We draw on data from an Australia...

Discrimination, harassment, and violence can mediate staff and students’ experiences of education and work. While there is increasing knowledge about these experiences in primary and secondary education, very little is known about these experiences in higher education. This paper draws from landmark research that examines the interpersonal, educati...

The initial aim of this research was to investigate the experiences of sexuality and gender diverse (SGD) staff and students. After discussions with Western’s executive, the remit of the project was expanded to include perceptions and attitudes to sexuality and gender diversity on campus, (un)safe places, and bystander capacity. By including non-SG...

Queer Youth and Media Cultures is an important edited collection that examines how lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) identities are constructed, performed, and represented in television, movies, and new media spaces. Bringing together diverse scholarly work, the authors extend recent work on LGBT youths’ use of online spaces and how LG...

HIV-positive gay men and other men who have sex with men (MSM) experience sexual stigma, HIVrelated stigma and isolation that can function as barriers to accessing information related to HIV. Little is known about how these men utilise and use technology to overcome these barriers. This study sought to explore technology use and identify key techno...