Newsletter - November 2014 A minute with Jessica Noske-Turner Having just finished her PhD at QUT, Jessica Noske-Turner has joined DERC as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on “Evaluating communication for development: supporting adaptive and accountable approaches to development” an ARC Linkage project led by Jo Tacchi. Jess is also working on another ARC Linkage project (led by Heather Horst) “Mobilising Media for Sustainable Outcomes in the Pacific Region”, which has kept her busy with a recent workshop in PNG, a field visit to Vanuatu and her current role synthesising the field data. Jess is excited to be working on these projects as they complement her PhD research, which focused on effective evaluation practices for media assistance initiatives with a particular focus on the Cambodian Communication Assistance Project (CCAP) being managed by ABC International Development and funded by Australian Aid-DFAT. What for Jess initially seemed like a really niche study area is part of what she terms ‘communication for social change’—a strong theme throughout the past decade and certainly within DERC. Events 25 November: DERC - “All Hands” Meeting (Room 9.4.31, RMIT City Campus - 11am-12:30pm) 15-16 December: Issues in Critical Internet Studies. A Masterclass with Geert Lovink (registration is now closed) 17-18 December: From “the player” to “the crowd:” Locating the subjects of a digital ethnography. A Masterclass with Mary Gray and TL Taylor More details at http://www.digital-ethnography.net/ newsevents Building on these projects, Jess is interested in exploring notions of failure in C4D. She is currently looking at the ‘innovation funding’ model, where ‘high-risk, high-reward’ projects have a focus on ongoing learning. However ‘failures’ often remained locked away and only traces of discontinued projects are left in evaluation reports. This is quite different from the Failfare model in mobile for development (M4D)—a closed-door event to share and learn from failures. The shift away from the solitary life of a postgrad student to working collaboratively everyday has been incredible for Jess. Being new to ethnography—let alone digital ethnography— means Jess sometimes feels out of her depth, but DERC’s environment of engaging and dynamic researchers has allowed Jess’s skill set to complement other researchers while also giving her a constant stream of learning opportunities. Welcome to DERC Jess! For those that missed out... Wendy Hsu’s Digtial Ethnography Design workshop held last month in the Design Hub was a great success! For those interested in attending but anable to appear, Wendy has kindly uploaded the materials she used in the workshop itself. Slides for the talk can be accessed here http://slidesha.re/Zust4E while the workshop handouts can be found here https://drive. google.com/file/d/0B9LQLhZLMFaicnZ3X05FWHVodW8/ view?usp=sharing News and links • Sarah Pink, along with Vaike Fors, Martin Berg and Tom O’Dell have just secured funding for the “Sensing, shaping, sharing: measuring and imagining the body in a mediatized world” project through the RJ Foundation, Sweden, with the SCACA. Amounts are 5,711,000.00 SEK, ($911,807.95 AUD) and the project runs from 2015-18. • Heather Horst and Daniel Miller’s Digital Anthropology is now out in Chinese. The edited volume, which includes chapters by DERC members Heather Horst, John Postill, Jo Tacchi and Adjunct Professor Daniel Miller, was translated by Xinyuan Wang and published with People’s Publishing House, one of the most prestigious publishers in China.