Contemporary Health Education and Digital Media Practice: Challenges and Opportunities
Thursday 7 March 2013
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
| Event type | Seminar |
| Location | St Johns Building - Room 050 |
Speaker: Ben Light, Professor of Digital Media, University of Salford
Historically, media such as television, radio and print, have been engaged in attempts to educate and affect behaviour change, with varying degrees of success, and across a range of health contexts. Research in this area identifies a range of relevant issues here such as those relating to cost, evaluation mechanisms, effectiveness of intervention, external influences on campaigns and the need to consider the diversity of audiences. Whilst there is also work in this area which focusses more specifically on digital media forms, a contemporary systematic analysis of this is required to inform future practice and research. Such an analysis is required given the evolving nature of digital media, because this can change practice but also because it requires us to think about the extent to which it is necessary to (re)theorize the appropriation of digital media in health contexts. In this seminar, drawing upon action research projects in the area of health promotion,I will consider the contemporary challenges and opportunities that digital media afford and recommend an agenda for future research in this area.
Bio:
I am Associate Dean – Research and Innovation in the College of Arts and Social Sciences and Professor of Digital Media, in the University of Salford’s School of Arts and Media. I am also a member of the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Research Centre and I sit on the University’s Digital Cluster Executive. I’m interested in how people get different kinds of technologies to work for them on an everyday basis. I started out looking at this in the 1990s, generally in the workplace.
However, since then I have found that developments outside work have tended to hold my attention more. I still do research about people and work, but given the way life is being played out in many (but not all) parts of the world I think there’s more to do beyond this. My current research agenda centres on analysing the development and use of the Internet and Digital Games, specifically as related to health and wellbeing, engagement, gender and sexuality. Recent publications include: Crawford et. al. (2011) Online Gaming in Context (Routledge) and Light et. al. (2012) ‘Connect and create’: Young people, YouTube and Graffiti Communities (Journal of Media & Cultural Studies). I am a senior editor of the Journal of Information Technology and a member of the editorial
board of New Media and Society.
Bio:
I am Associate Dean – Research and Innovation in the College of Arts and Social Sciences and Professor of Digital Media, in the University of Salford’s School of Arts and Media. I am also a member of the Communication, Cultural and Media Studies Research Centre and I sit on the University’s Digital Cluster Executive. I’m interested in how people get different kinds of technologies to work for them on an everyday basis. I started out looking at this in the 1990s, generally in the workplace.
However, since then I have found that developments outside work have tended to hold my attention more. I still do research about people and work, but given the way life is being played out in many (but not all) parts of the world I think there’s more to do beyond this. My current research agenda centres on analysing the development and use of the Internet and Digital Games, specifically as related to health and wellbeing, engagement, gender and sexuality. Recent publications include: Crawford et. al. (2011) Online Gaming in Context (Routledge) and Light et. al. (2012) ‘Connect and create’: Young people, YouTube and Graffiti Communities (Journal of Media & Cultural Studies). I am a senior editor of the Journal of Information Technology and a member of the editorial
board of New Media and Society.
