DERC 2020 HDR representatives

December 20, 2019

Following a call for nominations we are delighted to announce that Khiem Le and Pradip Sarkar will serve as DERC’s HDR representatives in 2020! Both Khiem and Pradip bring enthusiasm, collegiality and commitment to the role, and we are delighted to have the opportunity to work with them more closely next year.

Khiem Le is currently doing a Ph.D. regarding the K-pop fandom in Vietnam. His Ph.D. looks at the K-pop fandom from the perspective of social media and micro-celebrity studies such as how some K-pop fans can rise beyond their consumption and become fan-lebrities and demi-idols among their peers.

As the DERC HDR representative, Khiem’s objective is to increase the sense of connectedness among DERC members as well as all HDR students from the School of Media and Communication alike. In order to accomplish that goal, he intends on drawing from his experience as the DSC HDR Organising Committee member, in which he has organized different events such as the DSC Intertext Symposium, in order to plan and organize events that bring together DERC members and showcase their research.

Pradip Sarkar is undertaking a PhD,  examining the digital (media) ecologies of Indian DIY music producers, at the RMIT School of Media and Communications. He is also a lecturer in ICT at the RMIT College of Business, and a practicing DJ and music producer with connections to designers of digital media, and community radio in Melbourne.

Pradip is interested in how digital artefacts shape and are shaped by developments in the creative industries, including the role of such artefacts in the design of ethnographic methods.  As an HDR representative of the DERC, he intends to draw on his experiences as an academic as well as a practitioner to support and cultivate scholarly engagement of his fellow HDR colleagues.