A collaboration between scholars from media studies and book publishing studies to address key challenges faced by children and their families in today’s rapidly changing media context. Our vision is to help create a safe and socially responsive mediascape for children and their families in post-COVID Australia.
About us
Since we began in 2021, the CFMRG has adopted a holistic approach to investigating child and family media use, and the social and cultural factors that influence and interact with it. Based in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, we study both younger and older children, including adult children, and our focus on families is multi-generational. Our researchers have interdisciplinary expertise in both digital and traditional media – from books and ebooks to cinema, television and personal screens – and some of us are former media professionals. We actively engage with industry networks and community organisations to understand and enrich children’s and family media culture in Australia and the world.
Research
In 2021, the group began to study changes in children’s media use caused by the long COVID lockdowns. Our aim was to investigate exactly how increased screen use was affecting children’s lives, including activities such as book reading and play. Since November 2021, we have run two large national surveys of Australian parents, which support that children’s use of electronic tablets and computer games has increased since the lockdowns began, library visits play less of a role in family life than before the pandemic, apps are more important for families’ access to media content, and media devices are more likely to be found in children’s bedrooms since COVID lockdowns. This research was supported by grant funding in 2021 and 2022 from the School of Culture and Communication.
In 2022, the group published its first article from its surveys: Nolan, S., Day, K., Shin, W., Wang, W., ‘Books Versus Screens: A Study of Australian Children’s Media Use During the COVID Pandemic’. Publishing Research Quarterly (2022), 38: 749–759. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-022-09899-w
Members have also given conference presentations at the following conferences: the Independent Publishing Conference, Wheeler Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, December 2021; the Australian and New Zealand Communications Association Conference, University of Wollongong, NSW, November 2022; the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, SHARP 2023, University of Otago, NZ, June 2023.
In 2022, Assoc. Prof. Wonsun Shin received seed funding from the Faculty of Arts to pilot qualitative research towards an ARC Linkage grant application. This pilot has now been completed and is at write-up.
In related research by group members, Dr Katherine Day is currently investigating the plight of children’s picture books in an increasingly electronic children’s mediacape. Dr Wilfred Wang is currently leading a project that adopts research knowledge into actionable responses to the issue of digital exclusion faced by many older Asian migrants in Australia during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Our people
A/Prof Wonsun Shin
Wonsun Shin is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication, and co-leader of the CFMRG. Her research focuses on how young people live with digital media in the increasingly commercialised world and what roles various socialisation agents (parents, peers, and schoolteachers) play in young people’s interactions with digital media and marketing communication messages. Wonsun’s recent and ongoing work examines children’s use of digital media and the role of parental mediation, teen social media users’ privacy management strategies, and young adults’ responses to data-driven personalised advertising and cognitive and social factors associated with it. Wonsun’s research approach is interdisciplinary, integrating theories in media and communications, marketing, child development and psychology. She has authored numerous journal articles, book chapters, and books, including Screen-Obsessed: Parenting in the Digital Age (2019) and Screen Smart: Growing Up in the Digital Age (2023). Wonsun actively engages with scholarly communities in a range of roles, including as an Associate Editor of the Journal of Advertising, a member of the Editorial Review Board of the International Journal of Advertising, the International Officer of the Australian and New Zealand Communication Association, and an invited speaker at international expert meetings.
Dr Sybil Nolan
Sybil Nolan is a Senior Lecturer in Publishing and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication and co-leader of the CFMRG. Before joining the University of Melbourne she worked in media industries for 25 years, first as a daily newspaper journalist and then as a commissioning editor and editorial consultant in book publishing. She was a member of the ARC Discovery Project ‘New Tastemakers and Australia’s Post-Digital Literary Culture’, led by Professor Mark Davis. Her media research has focused on change in newspaper reviewing and its impact on the book industry, on the rise of social media as an alternative book marketing tool, and on the effects of pandemic lockdowns on publishing operations. Sybil’s interest in the impacts of COVID-19 on children’s reading grew out of personal interactions with family members and friends during the pandemic lockdowns, as it became apparent children were spending more time on screens. Initially, she was most interested in the potential consequences for children’s reading of traditional books and the secondary impacts of lockdowns on the publishing industry. She was lead author on the group’s first article, ‘Books Versus Screens: A Study of Children’s Media Use during the COVID Pandemic’ (2022). Sybil is currently researching the experiences of children’s librarians during the pandemic.
Dr Katherine Day
Katherine Day is a Lecturer in Publishing Practice at The University of Melbourne and a former editor with over 15 years of experience in-house and freelance for some of Australia’s most well-known publishing houses, including Penguin Random House, Allen & Unwin, Thames and Hudson, and Working Title Press. Her research explores author–publisher relationships and editorial mediation in trade publishing; it forms the focus of her latest monograph: Publishing Contracts and the Post Negotiation Space (2023). Her work within the CFMRG explores the plight of children’s picture books in a converged literary landscape, assessing how picture book publishers cater to diverse readerships and new reading platforms in the digital age. This study emerged from Katie’s work on the group’s first national survey, published as ‘Books Versus Screens: A Study of Australian Children’s Media Use During the Covid Pandemic’ (2022).
Dr Wilfred Wang
Wilfred Yang Wang is a Lecturer in Media and Communications Studies in the School of Culture and Communication, where he is also Director of Undergraduate Studies.
His research focuses on data and algorithmic governance, the biopolitics of ageing, diasporic media, digital geography and China. He is the author of the book, Digital Media in Urban China Locating Guangzhou (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019), which examines the practices of digital placemaking and geo-identities in urban China. Wilfred’s recent projects focus on digital infrastructural buildings and governance in China and Australia with specific attention to the biopolitical governance of ageing bodies in a digital era. He is also enthusiastic about applied research and is currently leading a project that adopts research knowledge into actionable responses to the issue of digital exclusion faced by many older Asian migrants in Australia during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Dr Lauren Bliss
Lauren Bliss is a media researcher and sessional teacher. She writes and researches the history and figuration of pregnancy in screen cultures, cultures of parenting on digital media, social media genres and inclusion and diversity in secondary school English and media curricula. Lauren is the author of The Maternal Imagination of Film and Film Theory (Palgrave: 2020) and has been published extensively in journals including First Monday, Journal of Television and New Media, Senses of Cinema, as well as English in Australia, Idiom and The Australian Educational Researcher. In 2022, she helped lead CFMRG’s qualitative research on the impacts of pandemic lockdowns on children’s reading and use of screens.
Dr Xin Pei
Xin Pei is a Lecturer in in Media and Communications in the School of Culture and Communication. Before joining the University of Melbourne, she studied and worked at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; The Chinese University of Hong Kong; the University of Nottingham; Ningbo China; and the Ageing Research Institute for Society and Education (ARISE) in Singapore. Her research focus lies in examining the social consequences of adopting information and communication technologies (ICTs) in the context of marginalisation. Xin uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the (dis)empowerment brought about by the adoption and usage of ICTs in different contexts encompassing gender, ageing and racism. Her research has appeared in leading journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Information, Communication & Society, and Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies. A current research project focuses on intergenerational technology transmission from adult children to their ageing parents, exploring the concerns and challenges faced by adult children when integrating digital technologies in aged care.
Thomas Weight
Thomas Weight is a PhD candidate and graduate research teaching fellow in Media and Communication in the School of Culture and Communication. His PhD project focuses on digitality, examining how the mediation of culture by digital networks has a profound impact on psychology that is symptomatised by the marked changes to today’s psychopathological landscape. This project was inspired by Thomas’ experience of the COVID-19 lockdowns, wherein the ‘moving’ of life online seemed to activate previously latent cultural transformations. He has previously worked as a Research Officer for both the ANU Centre For Social Research and Methods and the UNSW Social Policy Research Centre where he co-authored papers on discourse analysis.
Contact
A/Professor Wonsun Shin
T: +61 3 9035 3519, E: wonsun.shin@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Sybil Nolan
T: +61 3 83447398, E: sybil.nolan@unimelb.edu.au
Dr. Katherine Day
E: day.k@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Lauren Bliss
E: lauren.bliss@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Wilfred Wang
E: wilfred.wang@unimelb.edu.au
Dr Xin Pei
E: xin.pei@unimelb.edu.au
Thomas Weight
E: t.weight@unimelb.edu.au