Digital cultures of wellbeing, wellness and finance
With Dr Catherine Hartung (lead, Swinburne Uni), Dr Rosie Welch (Monash Uni) and Professor Kath Albury (Swinburne Uni)
This project brings together our varied and shared interests in pedagogy, digital media and health and wellbeing cultures. First starting with digital ethnography of a wellness influencer (across multiple platforms), we have extended our work to consider how social media enables ways of learning about the teaching profession (on TikTok).
Health, teachers & influencer pedagogies
This project explores how digital cultures support and extend wellness culture including alternative health issues and values, coaching and consulting and commercially driven approaches to psychotherapy, mental health care and healing.
By investigating how the relationship between wellness, wellbeing and mental health is produced and sustained, this project aims to better and more closely understand the differences between approaches and the implications of this relationship for health education and student wellbeing.
Welllness culture and the relationship with mental health and wellbeing in digital spaces
With Dr Benjamin Hanckel (Western Sydney University) and Dr Angel Zhong (School of Economics, Finance & Marketing, RMIT University)
The fintech sector in Australia has grown rapidly, with 2019 sector research predicting annual growth would exceed $4 billion by 2020. Digital platforms both simplify and speed up financial transactions within and between platforms, banks and other businesses. When it comes to fintech platforms, popular press frame these apps and platforms as sensible, productive and innovative technologies that assist everyday Australians to make “smart” decisions about their financial future, regardless of the diverse ways Australians actually use these technologies. Regulation of these technologies and markets varies, and there is limited research about users’ financial statuses and their investing practices, particularly young people.
This project explores the relationship between social context and practices and decision making in speculative trading through digital platforms, particularly in networks of young adults (18 to 30 years) in Australia and how these practices relate to their wellbeing, future imaginaries and engagement with digital cultures.
Young adult investors, digital finance cultures & uncertainty
Platform pedagogies
With the Platform Pedagogies team, Prof Julian Sefton-Green (Deakin), Dr Luci Pangrazio (Deakin), Gavin Duffy (Deakin), Dr Robbie Fordyce (Monash), Dr Alexia Maddox (Deakin)
This research initiative investigates the pedagogic dimension of these platforms thus drawing on older theoretical traditions that use pedagogy as a way of describing and explaining the relationships between individual and society, agency and structure. We explore what it means to conceive of the relationship between people and their platforms as a pedagogic relationship, and how such conceptualisations might advance study of platforms in general. We examine the relationship between learning, schooling and education systems as they are now moving into and across emerging platforms, thus, advancing scholarship about the uses of platforms in education.
