Tania Lewis

Core Members

Tania Lewis is Professor in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. Her research critically engages with the politics of lifestyle, sustainability and consumption, and with global media and digital cultures.

An ex-medical practitioner, Tania has conducted a wide range of research including video ethnographic studies of household recycling, backyard permaculture and everyday digital household media use.

Tania has published over 70 journal articles, book chapters and reports while her most recent book, Digital Food: From Paddock to Platform (Bloomsbury 2020), is the first monograph to engage with everyday digital practices and food culture.

Tania is also the author/co-author of a number of other books including Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (Sage); Smart Living: Lifestyle Media and Popular Expertise (Peter Lang), and Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Lives in Asia (Duke University Press).

Projects

She is chief investigator on several projects:

‘Cafe Lab: a community project to transform surplus, rescued food into delicious meals for the community, with zero waste’ (with Martyn Hook and Helen Addison-Smith)

‘The Shut-in Worker: COVID and home-based digital work practices’ (with Andrew Glover and Indigo Holcombe-James)

An ACCAN-funded project ‘E-Change and Remote Work in Australia’ (with Andrew Glover and Julian Waters-Lynch)

Digital food provisioning in urban households (with Ralph Horne and Bhavna Middha)

Growing Links: Stephanie Alexander Kitchen Garden Foundation Digital Platform Pilot (with Seth Keen and Bhavna Middha)

Websites

rmit.academia.edu/TaniaLewis

worklifeecologies.org/

Labs

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.

Projects

CafeLab

Building an inclusive, low carbon and equitable hospitality sector   An Australia-first initiative, CaféLab brings researchers across RMIT, from STEM and HASS, together with industry and policy actors, with the shared...

Publications

The Absent Presence of Aeromobility: A Case of Australian Academic Air Travel Practices and University Policy

Food and Digital Lifestyles in Asia: From MasterChef to Mukbang

E-change and remote work in Australia

Are people ready for a Digital CBD? The new infrastructure demands

Pop-up food provisioning as a sustainable third space: reshaping eating practices at an inner urban university

Spatio-temporalities of convenience eating for sustainability outcomes at an inner-urban university

Overcoming remoteness: the necessity of air travel in Australian universities

Gleaning around the globe: Reframing urban thrift via practices and economies of hard rubbish reuse

Digital Connectivity

Spatio-temporalities of convenience eating for sustainability outcomes at an inner-urban university

Embracing liminality and ‘staying with the trouble’ on [and off] screen

Melbourne: Care, Ethics, and Social Enterprise Meet Global Café Culture

Food politics and the media in digital times: researching household practices as forms of digital food activism

Melbourne: Care, ethics and social enterprise meets ‘global’ café culture

New temporalities of everyday life in Australian suburbia: cultural and material economies of hard rubbish reuse

Melbourne: Care, Ethics, and Social Enterprise Meet Global Café Culture

Digital Food: From Paddock to Platform

Lewis critically analyzes how our relationship to food consumption, production, and politics is being re-mediated through digitally connected electronic devices, practices and content.

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.