The Digital Futures Lab (DFL) is a research initiative in the School of Communication and Arts. We support startup research projects that address critical developments in digital ecosystems, digital experiences of everyday life and the discursive, political and economic forces that express themselves through the design and usage of digital technologies in Australia and across the world.
As an interdisciplinary research group reaching across Communication and Arts, the DFL interfaces with the larger strategic focus of the Humanities and Social Sciences at UQ, where the HASS Centre for Digital Cultures and Societies is a designated area of research strength.
Our research emphasizes critical humanistic approaches to the evolution of digital societies. A culturally and historically grounded approach to the interaction between digital systems and social change allows our researchers to make grounded interventions in domains where there is strong public interest in countering the prevailing ethos that positions technological disruption as an unqualified good unhindered by human imperatives. For designers, the Digital Futures Lab offers important social and cultural expertise to support effective and humane digital solutions. In our outreach work, we strongly encourage public contributions and responsibilities for building healthy digital cultures and thriving communities.
The Digital Futures Lab currently has four research nodes:
- Digital Arts – the creative industries
- Digital Publics – communities and citizens
- Digital Transactions – economy and commerce
- Digital Health – mental, physical and social well-being
Under these four themes, our researchers are working on distinctive topics, such as – public arts, generative AI, fintech and health, where there are cogent opportunities for external research partnerships and public engagement. Digital Futures are understood as futures for the work of our disciplines, and social futures for Australia and Queensland.
Centre Director
Associate Professor Adrian Athique
Digital Transactions Node
- Adrian Athique (Node Leader)
- Giang Nguyen Thu
- Pradip Thomas
- Min Zhu (BEL) DFL Collaborative Research Fellow 2024
Digital Publics Node
- Aparna Hebbani (Node Leader)
- Levi Obijiofor
Digital Arts Node
- Caroline Wilson-Barnao (Node Leader)
- Richard Murray
- Natalie Collie
Digital Health Node
- Elizabeth Stephens (Node Leader)
- Karin Sellberg
PhD Researchers
Global Media and Internet Concentration India Team
(2021– 2027, SSHRC Canada, CI Adrian Athique)
The advent and massive expansion of the Internet and planetary scale digital platforms has breathed urgent new life into the enduring, simple, yet profound, question that animates this project: Have the media industries, individually and collectively, become more or less concentrated over time?
This project brings together a multidisciplinary team of more than 50 scholars and almost a dozen non-academic external partners to more consistently apply existing approaches and create new conceptual and methodological tools to address this question today.
Digital Transactions in Asia
(2022 –2026, Australian Research Council, CI Adrian Athique)
This project seeks to provide a comprehensive account of the rapid shift towards digital ecosystems in Asian economies via the affordances of transaction platforms, the significance of cultural diversity and concrete examples of everyday norms and practices. Empirical research of key platforms, ethnographies of diverse user cohorts across the region and large scale quantitative analysis of market and user data in eight countries are designed to provide a regional knowledge base for understanding the emerging forms of digital transactions in Asia. In addressing the implications for Australia, multilateral comparison will underpin robust policy recommendations on the digital economy and its trans-territorial implications.
Streets of Our Lives
(Digital Futures Lab 2024, CI Caroline Wilson-Barneo)
This project engages with an important but understudied area of Brisbane's cultural history: the music street press. These free tabloid magazines were distributed weekly or fortnightly in record stores, pubs, nightclubs, and coffee shops from the 1980s until early 2000s. Printed on low quality paper stock, these free newspapers were an important means through which local information was relayed to generations of young people who sought recommendations about places to visit connecting like-minded people to each other, music, and particular places. As digital media became the foremost way that people gained information about entertainment, street press operations moved to new digital formats or ceased to operate altogether, dramatically changing the music and arts industry.
While an extensive collection of street press is already housed in the John Oxley Library, there is little that connects this archive to oral histories that reflect upon the experience of different subcultures living in Brisbane at the time. This project extends upon the oral history that is currently housed in the John Oxley Library collection. The novel contribution of this project is to generate new knowledge about Brisbane's street press and the role of media in constructing identity and a sense of place. In the initial stages of this project a combination of archival research and interviews will help us generate a digital archive and map of the cultural history of Brisbane's music press and sub-cultures. These findings will then be placed in conversation with the contemporary uses of social media by young people seeking out new spaces of identity and connection in the digital era.
Examining Digital Precarities of Women from the African Humanitarian Diaspora in Australia
(Digital Futures Lab 2024, CI Aparna Hebbani)
Australia has settled humanitarian migrants from the Africa continent for many decades. A large portion of these settlers are women – many of whom are widowed with children. As part of migrant settlement and associated services, the Australian government and many other basic services have, in recent years, shifted to digital delivery mode (e.g., Centrelink, MyGov, Medicare, Child Support, banking).
It is within this context that this project aims to evaluate the impact of (in)exclusion of digital technology use among African women in Australia. Past research has indicated that digital uptake among this population disadvantages many because they do not have the necessary skills or access to technology (Culos et al., 2021). We extend past research to examine the impact that such digital precarity has on these women’s’ socio-familial relationships.
Intelligent Futures: Towards Humane Digital Societies in Australia and India, Australia India Institute, November 2023
The workshop served as a vibrant platform where academia, the diaspora, government, and industry stakeholders from both countries could come together, exchange ideas, and delve into the realm of digital humanities and intelligent futures. Through engaging presentations, panel discussions, and breakout sessions over two days, participants from Indian and Australia explored avenues for joint research, identifying opportunities and challenges and laying the groundwork for future endeavours in this transformative field.
Digital Transactions in Asia 2024, International Centre for Interdisciplinary Science and Education Research, Quy Nhon, Vietnam, February 2024
The Asian region is passing through a period of unprecedented social and economic change, and digital transaction platforms operate at the centre of these processes. Transaction platforms take a number of forms, including point of sale payment apps, money transfer services, trading platforms, micro credit apps and the multi-faceted exchange mechanisms built into retail, service and social media platforms. Together, they constitute a larger ecology of digital exchange that has enabled the rapid growth of online commerce, network economies and e governance across the varied political, cultural and economic geography of the region.
The 2024 DTA conference, staged in partnership with ICISER Vietnam, addressed multiple dimensions of this new phase of mediation, where Internets operate as transactional architectures for social transformation. Innovations in transaction architectures, chains and tokens has been integral to the rise of Asia's super platforms, allowing them to play a pivotal role in the transformation of everyday labour, consumption and sociability across the region. In our first post-COVID physical conference, Digital Transactions in Asia V sought to take stock of the acceleration of digital transactions during and after the pandemic, exploring the many ways in which everyday fintech has made lasting changes to the social, cultural and economic landscapes of Asia.
Digital Futures in Video Roundtable, November 2024
The DFL annual research roundtable event was held at the University of Queensland, St Lucia campus on 7th November 2024. Our focus on digital futures in Video engaged with the rapid technological and economic transformation of film and television. Topics debated included Home Video Economies, Documentary Futures, the Vitality of Australian Television and Stratified Streaming Markets in the global south. For this event, he DFL was pleased to welcome:
Ramon Lobato (RMIT)
Craig Hight (University of New Castle)
Elliot Logan (Monash University.
Digital Transactions in Asia 2025, Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia, January 2025
Since 2008, the targeting of unbanked populations in the Global South by a range of mobile financial services has dovetailed with equally significant interventions elsewhere in credit, currencies and commerce channelled through the super platforms of the smartphone decade. This confluence has engendered the worldwide spread of 'everyday fintech', with far-reaching ambitions for a 'great integration' of markets, exchanges and lifeworlds networked through digital transactions. Digital transactions have become central to the strategic design and operation of digital ecosystems, social laboratories and eGovernance regimes around the world. This larger convergence of the finance and technology sectors requires scholars across disciplines to pay closer attention to the transactional architecture of the Internet.
The three day Digital Transactions in Asia VI conference staged in partnership with Universitas Brawijaya Indonesia took up this challenge up by exploring the multi-faceted role of digital transactions in the evolution of contemporary Asian Internets, detailing the role of transaction platforms and design of transaction chains within platform ecosystems, as well as highlighting the informal transaction chains assembled by everyday users. In an evolving policy domain dominated by technocratic visions of sustainable development, we explored the social and cultural implications of the transaction orders emerging in Asia as a consequence of digitisation, along with the social shaping of digital transactions amongst businesses, workers, consumers and citizens in a culturally diverse region.
Capitalization of Social Mobility in India: Venture Capital in EdTech Platforms, February 2025
Assoc. Prof. Akshaya Kumar, IIT Indore, India.
This talk explored the surge and collapse of VC-backed EdTech start-ups in India, explaining how quickly the EdTech ecosystem spread its tentacles. This was not due to superior product offerings in education but rather because of the attendant credit strategies baked into their business models. As such, platforms operating as Edtech-Fintech combines strategically capitalized the desperate aspiration for social mobility in India. In their rapid capitalization of "underperforming" assets in this burgeoning market, VC-led start-ups pursued aggressive short-term strategies of lending and recovery which led to widespread distress amongst learner-borrowers.
Since education is one of the key bounding blocks of modern citizenship, the damage to the reputation and promise of online education in India was significant. The over-reliance of expansive EdTech business models on venture capital can be seen as a determining factor in creating an unstable market. The fallout from the collapse of the EdTech bubble reveals not only the high stakes of platformization in India, but also brings into question the state endorsement of online platforms as easy solutions for the "inclusion" of those excluded by chronic shortfalls in public education.
Streets of Our Lives, Queensland State Library, February 2025
Brisbane boasts a vibrant history of the street press – independent magazines focused on music, culture and community news that for decades reached diverse and passionate readers and helped them navigate their city. Publications such as Time Off, Scene, and Rave plus Brisbane Underground Music Scene (B.U.M.S., for short) and QNews are an important part of the city’s cultural history.
In Streets of your town: Mapping Brisbane’s street press a capacity audience at the Queensland State Library heard from key figures in Brisbane's independent media and music scene, past and present: Joc Curran, Mundanara Bayles, James Lees, Kellie Lloyd, and Sean Sennett. The panel discussed the birth of iconic Brisbane media, early challenges in the 80s and 90s, and how indie presses and other media such as 4ZZZ and Murri Country connected and enriched the lives of so many people.
With a special guest and live music performance by Ben Ely, this event was held in partnership with DFL, Queensland State Library and AustLit as part of our Brisbane Street Press and Australian Rock Music database projects. AustLit will now house information on different street presses, including links to interviews with writers, editors, and other local identities involved with its creation and distribution.
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