[Air-L] IR 13: Announcing a further three plenary speakers...

[Attwood, Feona]

Mary L. Gray is Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research New England and Associate Professor of Communication and Culture at Indiana University. Her work focuses on how people use digital and social media in everyday ways to shape their social identities and create spaces for themselves. Her book, Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America (2009) examined how youth in rural parts of the United States fashioned ‘queer’ senses of gender and sexual identity and the role that media—particularly internet access—played in their lives and political work. Her current research includes work on ethnographically-informed social media research, compliance cyberinfrastructures in universities and their impact on emerging media research, online labour, and the importance of location and place in the context of mobile technologies.


Larissa Hjorth is an artist, digital ethnographer and Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, Australia. Her research interests are in the gendered customising of mobile communication, gaming and virtual communities in the Asia–Pacific and she is the author of Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific (2008). She is the editor (with Gerard Goggin) of Mobile technologies: from Telecommunication to Media (2008) and (with Dean Chan) of Gaming Cultures and Place in the Asia–Pacific region (2009). She is the author of a textbook, Games & Gaming (2010).


Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku. Her research interests are in Internet research, studies of pornography and theories of affect. Her publications include (with Mia Consalvo) Women and Everyday Uses of the Internet: Agency and Identity (2002), Figures of Fantasy; Internet, Women and Discourse (2005), (with Kaarina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa) Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture (2007), (with Marianne Liljeström) Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences (2010), and Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography (2011). Susanna is currently launching a new research project on memory work/oral history, archives and pornography.