Larissa Hjorth

Core Members

Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth is an artist and digital ethnographer. Hjorth has two decades experience working in interdisciplinary, collaborative, playful and socially innovative digital media methods to explore intergenerational relationships in cross-cultural contexts.

Hjorth is currently the Design & Creative Practice ECP Platform director at RMIT University. The Platform focuses on interdisciplinary collaboration and creative solution to real-world problems, especially in relation to ageing well, careful and multisensorial methods.

Recent publications include Haunting Hands (with Cumiskey, Oxford Uni Press), Understanding Social Media(with Hinton, 2nd Edition Sage), Creative Practice Ethnographies (with Harris, Jungnickel and Coombs, Rowman & Little) and Ambient Play (with Richardson, MIT Press).

Hjorth will be keynoting at the Montreal public symposium B/OLD: Aging in our cityon play & ageing in May 2019 and the Digital Asia conference in Sweden in December. She is currently collaborating with colleagues in Spain and Japan around creative quotidian media practice for digital health and ageing well.

Hjorth has been a CI on five Australian Research Council (ARC) grants, as well as numerous arts funding and fellowships including Australian Council for the Arts New Media fellowship, Japan Foundation, Brain Korea fellowship, Asialink arts residency and Australia Council Tokyostudio.

Much of her participatory art projects seek to provide playful critical reflection on quotidian environment and media practices from climate change and Big Brother to what happens to our data after we die (#dataofthedead). Recent exhibitions include Model Citizen (RMIT Gallery, February 2019).

Publications

Academia

Research Repository

Personal website

http://www.larissahjorth.net/

Themes

Digital Domesticity, Sustainability, and the Everyday

Digital Domesticity, Sustainability, and the Everyday examines the role of everyday life practices and homes as increasingly central hubs of digital engagement and smart infrastructure.

Creativity, Learning, Digital Arts, and Design

Creativity, Learning, Digital Arts, and Design positions research participants as ‘creative agents’ and authors of their own experience.

Digital Inclusion, Mobility, and Activism

The research program examines the challenges and potentials of digital participation as this relates to access and inclusion, connectivity, networks and political activism, gig or micro work, and mobility and migration.

Publications

Capturing Urban Play at the Digital-Material Nexus: an Interfacial and Social Practice Research Approach

Live-streaming, games and politics of gender performance: The case of Nüzhubo in China

“I wish they could have answered their phones”: Mobile communication in mass shootings

Social surveillance and Let’s Play: A regional case study of gaming in Manila slum communities

Mobility through Games: Asian international students and gaming cultures in Melbourne

Storing and sharing: Everyday relationships with digital material

Situating ‘careful surveillance’

Locative-Media Ethics: A Call for Protocols to Guide Interactions of People, Place, and Technologies

Supervised Play: Intimate Surveillance and Children’s Mobile Media Usage

Haptic Play: Understanding Hybrid Play through Pokemon GO

Ambient Play: Understanding Mobile Games in Everyday Life

‘Playing’ in Transmissions: Critical Tactics for Making and Communicating Research

Inventive Approaches to Data Tracking in More-Than-Human Worlds

The emergent potential of mundane media

Shelfie: A Framework for Designing Material Representations of Physical Activity Data

Understanding Games and Game Cultures

Digital games are one of the most significant media interfaces of contemporary life. Games today interweave with the social, economic, material, and political complexities of living in a digital age. But...

Screen Ecologies

Screen Ecologies examines the relationship of media, art, and climate change in the Asia-Pacific region.

Digital Media Practices in Households

This book ethnographically explores how households are being understood, articulated and defined by digital media practices.

Ambient Play

In Ambient Play, we examine how mobile gameplay fits into our day-to-day lives.

Exploring Minecraft: Ethnographies of Play and Creativity

Drawing on ethnographic insights, this book seeks to take Minecraft seriously as a cultural practice and an interdisciplinary phenomenon.

Haunting Hands: Mobile Media Practices and Loss

Haunting Hands looks at the consequences of digital media's ubiquitous presence in our lives, in particular the representing, sharing, and remembering of loss.

Digital Ethnography Principles and Practice

This sharp, innovative book champions the rising significance of ethnographic research on the use of digital resources around the world.

News

DERC’s research on COVID continues to surge ahead

July 21, 2020

We may have been in lockdown, but that didn’t stop DERC researchers from launching several projects to study the pandemic.