
Kath AlburyUNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Arts and Media
Kath Albury
PhD
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73
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Introduction
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September 2007 - December 2010
Publications
Publications (73)
The industry of sextech is on the rise. But while the term sextech has been applied to a wide range of intimate technologies, it is often understood in terms of technologies that enhance or improve sex in an individualist manner. This panel instead furthers an understanding less concerned with sexuality as a question of technological optimisation,...
In an academic milieu in which a lot of critical attention is dedicated to the data-grabbing, algorithmically biased, and asymmetrical power of massive techno-corporations, this panel explores how a focus on situated ordinary practices can provide us with a more complex, nuanced, and even at times contradictory account of what happens when pervasiv...
The urgency of enhancing community resilience in the face of escalating disasters necessitates a shift in disaster preparedness strategies. This paper presents a novel approach developed in collaboration with the Australian Red Cross, focusing on community-centred data practices for disaster resilience. Recognising the limitations of traditional di...
The present investigation is part of the Social Networks and Agency Project (SNAP), an 18-month longitudinal mixed methods study following adolescents located in New South Wales, Australia. The SNAP study aims to understand how online and offline social networks impact the development of sexual agency over time. This paper presents an analysis of t...
Sextech is currently experiencing a golden age, promising technological innovation to improve sexual health and well-being. However, the privacy and security vulnerabilities of smart sex toys have been the subject of media attention. Dating apps, menstrual trackers and sex toy companies have paid millions in compensation for non-consensually collec...
As community services rapidly digitise, they are generating more data than ever before. These transformations are leading to innovation in data analysis and enthusiasm about the potential for data-driven decision making. However, increased use of personal data and automated systems raises ethical issues including gaining community trust, and introd...
Introduction. The present investigation is part of the Social Networks and Agency Project (SNAP), an 18-month longitudinal mixed methods study following adolescents located in New South Wales, Australia. The SNAP study aims to understand how online and offline social networks impact the development of sexual agency over time.
Methods. This paper p...
The book concludes by summarising the goals and stages of building data capability for non-profits, considering data capability as a resource for corporate upskilling, the facilitator of a more resilient sector and social justice activism. The middle part of the chapter considers useful actions leading up to initiating data projects and ways to pro...
Three illustrative case studies are provided of non-profit organisations’ data projects conducted by the authors, with partner non-profits, during 2017–2021. The case studies all use a collaborative data action methodology, but differ in the nature of datasets analysed, visualisations and data products generated. Case Study 1 included government de...
This chapter explains how data capability for non-profit organisations involves having the right skills, technologies and data management practices that match different organisations’ size, mission and contexts. Data capability is a holistic concept, and capability of organisations will flex over time and with changes in organisational goals, work...
In the digital age, people increasingly explore and express their sexual identities online. The management and development of digital sexual identities can provide opportunities of empowerment on the individual, interpersonal, and societal level. At the same time, social media users are confronted with risks of sexual disempowerment in terms of ide...
As dating apps continue to receive pressure from civil society, media and governments to address a range of safety concerns, technology companies have developed and deployed a spate of new safety features. Taken together, these features rely upon increased surveillance and partnerships with both technology start-up companies and law enforcement age...
In this paper, we explore the methodologies underpinning two participatory research collaborations with Australian non-profit organisations that aimed to build data capability and social benefit in data use. We suggest that studying and intervening in data practices in situ, that is, in organisational data settings expands opportunities for improvi...
Background:Adolescents use social media more frequently than other age groups. Social media has been described as a safe environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer and/or questioning (LGBTQ) adolescents. As part of mixed-methods research investigating the association between social networks and sexual agency, we present qualitati...
Background
Adolescents use social media more frequently than other age groups. Social media has been described as a safe environment for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer and/or questioning (LGBTQ) adolescents. As part of mixed-methods research investigating the association between social networks and sexual agency, we present qualitati...
The Swinburne node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) (2020-2027) is leading this project to understand and address the state of technology and data capacity in Australia’s not-for-profit (NFP) sector. The project aims to work collaboratively with NFP sector organisations to investigate data capacity a...
This panel deploys a range of qualitative methodologies to investigate how processes of datafication meet with the subjective experiences of ordinary people, and the practices of everyday life. We draw on the model of ‘everyday data cultures’ proposed by Burgess (2017) to explore the ways diverse data practices – including the production and circul...
This paper draws on qualitative research conducted with cis men aged 18–35, who used dating apps to meet women both before and during COVID-19 lockdown. Men in our study — which sought to better understand the aspects of app use that make young people feel safer or less safe — offered affectively loaded accounts of app use, which featured racialize...
Research exploring digital intimate publics tends to consider social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. This paper troubles that delineation by drawing on LGBTQ+ young people’s accounts of negotiating safety and risk in dating/hook-up apps, in which friendship pra...
This article reflects on 14 Australian trans dating app users’ accounts of feeling safer (and less safe) when using apps, as well as their experiences of sexual healthcare. We explore both app use and healthcare in the context of the interdisciplinary field of ‘digital intimacies’, considering the ways that digital technologies and cultures of tech...
Background
Understanding the factors influencing adolescents’ relationship views is important because early romantic relationships often act as precursors for relationships in adulthood. This study sought to examine the types of relationship-focused content adolescents witness on social media and how they perceive its effect on their romantic relat...
Practices of self-care and social support have long been identified across social media platforms and apps, as people find new ways of using and adapting digital technologies to mediate and address personal and public health issues. But digital health participation is considerably contested and unevenly experienced, whether through the commodified...
Drawing from a conceptual framework that problematises and redefines the digital lives of older people aged 65 years and over, this panel explores how older people engage with digital communication tools and skills, and the way this plays out in their everyday lives. Each paper situates older people as experiencing a rich social life integrated wit...
Digital media has played a historical role in orienting LGBTQ+ young people’s notions of ‘community’ around performances of identity and selfhood. In our research with LGBTQ+ dating app users aged 18–35, ‘queer community’ materialised in relation to participants’ expectations of ethical alignment with others, with an emphasis on performing a reflex...
In this paper we examine how popular media reporting positions dating and hookup app use as a ‘social problem’ that impacts on health and wellbeing. The paper adopts a mixed-methods media studies approach to create and analyse a dataset of over 6,000 international news articles published within a 12-month period, drawing on thematic content analysi...
Digital media research commonly explores the use of social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. By exploring how friendships enfold into LGBTQ+ young people’s use of dating/hook-up apps, this paper troubles that delineation. In 2018, we ran four workshops with LGBTQ...
Dating and hook-up apps constitute spaces of intense negotiation around issues of sex, identity and intimacy, in which norms are tested and reinforced. This paper examines discussions of ‘ideal app use’ which emerged in qualitative workshops conducted in 2018 with 23 LGBTQ+ app-users aged 18-35 in urban and regional New South Wales. We explore how...
A considerable amount of personal data is now collected on and by individuals: footsteps on Fitbits, screen time in Apple’s iOS, conversations on dating apps, sleeping patterns in baby tracker apps, and viewing habits on Netflix and YouTube. What value do these data have, for individuals but also for corporations, governments, and researchers? When...
Introduction
Social media may play a role in adolescent sexual development. The limited research on social media use and sexual development has found both positive and negative influences. The focus of this study is on sexual agency: a positive sexual outcome. This paper describes the protocol for the Social Networks and Agency Project (SNAP) study...
Recent Australian research has found that young people (broadly defined as 15–30-year-olds) express a strong preference for seeking out digital sexual health information that is produced by authoritative sources (e.g. government websites), but are more likely to share material that is funny and/or features intimate first-person narratives. This pro...
This chapter considers same-sex attracted young people’s experiences of using dating/hook-up apps. Study participants suggest that these are unregulated spaces that require users to develop their own rules and codes of conduct. They discussed a range of personal rules that have evolved through their use of dating and hook-up apps, and user etiquett...
Young people’s participation in online and mobile media practices poses challenges for health promotion practitioners and sexuality educators. Adult professionals are often personally unfamiliar with ‘controversial’ social and mobile media practices, such as the production and sharing of digital self-portraits (or selfies). This chapter reflects on...
This article reports on focus groups exploring the best way to reach young men with vulgar comedy videos that provide sexual health information. Young people reported that they found the means by which the material was presented – as a locked down app – to be problematic, and that it would better be delivered through social media platforms such as...
The ethical and social implications of data mining, algorithmic curation and automation in the context of social media have been of heightened concern for a range of researchers with interests in digital media in recent years, with particular concerns about privacy arising in the context of mobile and locative media. Despite their wide adoption and...
‘Safe Sexting: There’s No Such Thing’. Or so says a 2009 information brochure produced by the New South Wales (Australia) Department of Education. Just as decades of research demonstrates that abstinence-only sex education is at best ineffective and at worst results in negative health outcomes (Alford 2007), there is no reason to suspect that polic...
The journalistic hype and institutional exuberance embracing the sudden emergence of Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) could easily have led to the mistaken conclusion that online learning in higher education emerged, fully formed, in 2012 (Kent & Leaver, 2014; Leaver & Kent, 2014). However, there is a long history of different forms of distanc...
This article engages with media responses to the 2015 Ashley Madison hack (which largely exposed the sexual details of adult heterosexual men) and the 2014 ‘Fappening’ hack (which exposed private sexual images of adult female celebrities). It draws on Petchesky’s concept of positive sexual rights and Warner’s framework of sexual ethics to reflect o...
This article draws on focus group interviews with same-sex attracted Australian men and women aged 18-29, to reflect on their accounts of the perceived risks and opportunities offered by hook-up apps such as Grindr, Blendr, and Hornet. Until recently, scholarly accounts of same-sex attracted men hooking up online have primarily focused on measuring...
This article reflects on interview and survey data from a study of non-gay-and-lesbian-identified sex-partiers in New South Wales, Australia, to consider the ways that participants in ‘alternative’ sex sub-cultures (such as BDSM/fetish and swinging) challenge conventional understandings of heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual identity. It seeks to...
While many sexual health promotion campaigns in Australia targeting gay men have utilized erotic imagery, this approach is rarely deployed by projects targeting other populations. This paper reflects on the development of an innovative project targeting sexually adventurous women, emphasizing sexual behaviour such as kink/multiple partner play rath...
Recent Australian research on 'sexting' (the production and exchange of naked and semi-naked digital pictures) has observed that formal legal and educational discourses have failed to fully account for young people's understandings and experiences. While there is a proliferation of scholarly and popular texts focusing on the risks that sexting migh...
Through our eyes is a collection of powerful stories from thirty years of people living with HIV responding to the HIV and AIDS epidemics; the collection also contains stories from friends of people living with HIV and professionals who have worked in the field since the beginning of the epidemic. The book features a diverse range of writers, the m...
Both popular and academic discussions of pornography have explored the question of sexually explicit texts as pedagogy. While many commentators and scholars have acknowledged the educational qualities of pornography, there is no universal consensus as to what porn teaches its consumers and how it works as an educator. Pornography is increasingly it...
This paper outlines the ways in which media and cultural studies methodologies have been engaged with in order to conduct an investigation into the interplay between media and sexual learning in an Australian context. It brings ‘media practice’, ‘listening’ theory and ‘reparative reading’ together with interviews with Australian sexuality educators...
In today's media environment, information is not simply passed from producers to consumers, but is mediated by participants of new media cultures, including information on sexual health. In focus groups held in Sydney and regional Australia in 2011, we asked young people aged 16-22 about the potential for sexual health promotion via Facebook and ot...
Social media and social network sites (SNS) are an evolving area for sexual health communication with young people. They present opportunities and challenges for sexual health professionals and young people alike, such as learning through interactivity and addressing concerns about privacy. In this article, we present and discuss the findings from...
In today's media environment, information is not simply passed from producers to consumers, but is mediated by participants of new media cultures, including information on sexual health. In focus groups held in Sydney and regional Australia in 2011, we asked young people aged 16–22 about the potential for sexual health promotion via Facebook and ot...
This article contrasts the Megan's Story campaign, a recent Australian media and policy response to sexting (the act of taking and transmitting naked or semi-naked pictures via mobile phones) with interview responses drawn from an Australian study that has asked young people about mobiles and sexting. It considers local and international responses...
In 2004, the Australian National Rugby League (NRL) commissioned the Playing By The Rules research project in response to allegations of sexual assault by members of a professional rugby league team. This article offers an overview of the theoretical and methodological approaches adopted by the team, and the subsequent workplace education programme...
Since the 2008 Australian Senate Inquiry into the Sexualisation of Children in the Contemporary Media Environment, both the British and Scottish governments have conducted their own inquiries into the role that mediated representations of sex and/or sexuality play in the lives of children and young people. At the same time, scholars, commentators,...
This article considers the origins and focus of current Australian debates around the alleged 'sexualisation' of children and young people. It explores the popular discourses around youth and sexuality and unpacks the assumptions and contradictions that underwrite them, by addressing the terms of reference of the Australian Senate's 2008 Sexualisat...
A group of Australian researchers from a range of disciplines involved in studying children's sexual development developed a framework for researching healthy sexual development that was acceptable to all disciplines involved. The 15 domains identified were: freedom from unwanted activity; an understanding of consent; education about biological asp...
Feminist thinking on pornography since the early 1980s has tended to polarize into ‘pro’ and ‘anti’ camps. Within both camps, there is a tendency to rely on moral frameworks that rely on either/or understandings of what pornography is, and what it does. This article draws on Michel Foucault’s theory of ethics to offer, in Eve Sedgwick’s terms, a re...
Despite growing work on the educational potential of digital media, literacy debates in Australia have remained locked in a banal opposition between serious educational aims and trivial entertainment media. To reinvigorate these debates, this article overviews progressive approaches to media literacy and case studies debates around the sexualisatio...
In the first comprehensive examination of the production and consumption of pornography in Australia, Alan McKee, Kath Albury and Catharine Lumby present a wide-ranging view of the adult-content industry and its consumers.
IN LATE 1995 I began researching my honours thesis on ‘Representations of heterosexuality in media and popular culture’. I soon realised that there was a rich vein of heterosexual representation to be explored in popular men's magazines – that is to say, soft-core porn. Researching amateur images in soft-core pornography led me to consider the broa...