Students in lecture theatre

Upcoming events 

Public Lectures

The Institute of Advanced Studies hosts public lectures and events presented by our visiting scholars and guests. These events contribute to our goal of sharing research, ideas and encouraging discussion and debate within the community-at-large.
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  • 18 June - What are the harms of digital harms? Professor Rob Cover

    Digital harms such as online abuse, harassment, doxxing, disinformation and AI-generated deepfakes have increased substantially over the past decade, with more than 70% of Australian adults encountering harmful content or behaviour. Although many governments around the world are regulating platforms to be more responsive to harmful digital content, regulation is failing, misogyny and racist hate continue to circulate, and the digital experience is becoming ever-more toxic, with serious impact on psychological, emotional and social wellbeing.

    In this talk, Rob will showcase his recent research on digital harms remedies, how everyday Australians are navigating toxic digital media and some of the solutions needed to detoxify digital culture. He will discuss the role of penalties for perpetrators, better platform compliance models, how to educate everyday users to be better digital citizens and the potential for international agencies to guide harm reduction. Our social future now relies on grassroots, multi-sector “war on lies and hate”.

    Professor Rob Cover
    Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication and Director of the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre. He leads a number of major funded research projects on digital harms, young people and wellbeing, and gender/sexuality diversity in screen contexts. He is the author of twelve books, including Identity and Digital Communication: Concepts, Theories, Practices (2023), Identity in the COVID-19 Years: Communication, Crisis, and Ethics (2024) and Australian Queer Screens (2025). He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights (2024) and The Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies (2025).
    18 June 2026, 5pm-6.30pm, Social Sciences Lecture Theatre, UWA

    REGISTER

Workshops, Symposia, Seminars and Roundtables

Ashburton River at Nanutarra Homestead, Nanutarra - Ashley Chitty
Ashburton River at Nanutarra Homestead, Nanutarra - Ashley Chitty

25 JUNE 2026
Extractive Industries and the Protection and Preservation of Indigenous Heritage. Exploring Collaborative and Comparative Perspectives and Strategies.

The preservation of Indigenous heritage remain significant challenges within a period increasingly characterised by national and international fragmentation, economic insecurities, and irreversible environmental degradation. The work to protect Indigenous heritage is also made more difficult by legislative and political environments that continue to favour economic development and extractive resource exploitation. In this respect, events, approaches, and engagements in Australia are reflections of wider and interrelated structures and processes that continue in myriad ways across the Global South and beyond. This one-day symposium will bring together national and international experts and practitioners and Aboriginal Traditional Owners to exchange their views and experiences, to discuss case studies, and strategies for reconciliation and remediation, and how positive outcomes can be achieved for all involved parties in a rapidly changing world. For this occasion, we have the privilege to be able to engage with Mélanie Duval and Marie Forget from Savoie Mont Blanc University, France, who are visiting UWA and who have extensive experience in working on the above issues in Europe, Africa and South America.

25 June 2026, 8.30am-5pm, Woolnough Lecture Theatre, Geology, UWA

Register

Postgraduate Masterclasses

Mobile Ethnography- A Masterclass with Professor Rob Cover

16 June 2026, 1:30pm-3pm, The Circle, Reid Library, UWA

Rob CoverUnderstanding people-centric experiences is at the core of all humanities and social sciences research, including particularly cultural, media and audience research, and as a mechanism to generate research impact pathways. However, it has often required laborious effort in interviews, participatory observation and focus groups to gain enough data to produce genuine insights on how people think about and practice social, cultural and mediated engagement. This masterclass will discuss an emergent research method for collecting substantial, rich and relevant data from everyday participants without the burdens and costs associated with traditional data collection, and without the need for sophisticated technological know-how: building an app to conduct mobile ethnography. We will walk through how to build a simple mobile ethnography to collect close-to-real-time people-centric data from everyday participants. Providing the convenience of an app’s look-and-feel and the ease of using a simple survey tool to collect offered data from signed-up participants over a longer period can build a rich data resource for analysis.

Participants will discuss the benefits of mobile ethnography apps used at the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre, how to build a very simple interface that mimics an ‘app’, and we will work together to quickly develop and test a mobile ethnography app in real time.

Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication and Director of the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre. He leads a number of major funded research projects on digital harms, young people and wellbeing, and gender/sexuality diversity in screen contexts. He is the author of twelve books, including Identity and Digital Communication: Concepts, Theories, Practices (2023), Identity in the COVID-19 Years: Communication, Crisis, and Ethics (2024) and Australian Queer Screens (2025). He is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights (2024) and The Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies (2025).
REGISTER

Past lectures

Many of our events are recorded. See our Past lectures page for more information and links to these recordings.

Past lectures
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