Tania Lewis

I am the research leader and co-founder of CaféLab, previous Director of the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and a Professor of Media and Communication at RMIT University in inner city Melbourne. My interests mainly revolve around sustainable living/ lifestyles/ post carbon consumption while my empirical research largely draws on video ethnography.

Hailing originally from New Zealand, I spent my school years in Wellington, Liverpool, Perth and Cape Town. My first degree was in medicine and I practiced as a doctor (mainly in psychiatry) in the early 90s. I came to cultural theory in 1993 as a refugee from all things positivistic and completed a fast-tracked honours degree and an MA in a wonderful American Studies department at Canterbury University in NZ where I was exposed to a somewhat unholy mixture of British cultural studies, continental philosophy and American literary and cultural theory and philosophy.

I moved to Melbourne University to do a PhD on the intellectual history of cultural studies (at a time when Lacan reigned supreme but my own interests lay with Foucault and Bourdieu). In the past 12 years post-PhD I have worked primarily as a Research Fellow in an eclectic mix of disciplinary settings from media studies and sociology to critical public health. My research focus, as you'll see from the papers uploaded here, has been similarly eclectic. If you are having difficulty finding the published versions of any of these articles or chapters please feel free to email me.

Cheers and thanks for reading this far!