School of Arts and Humanities

Dr Madison Godfrey (they/them) is an author, educator, and researcher, with scholarly expertise across creative writing, gender, music fandom, and sexology. Madison’s second book Dress Rehearsals (Allen & Unwin, 2023) received national praise and was celebrated as one of the best books of 2023 by The Guardian and The West Australian.

Madison is a previous recipient of a Creative Research Fellowship from the Forrest Research Foundation, the Kat Muscat Fellowship from Express Media, and a Writer in Residence position with the National Trust of Western Australia. Their research dissemination includes numerous creative outputs, including articles for The Guardian and Refinery29. As an internationally acclaimed poet, Madison has performed at The Sydney Opera House, The Royal Albert Hall, and Glastonbury Festival.

Madison’s PhD, achieved at Curtin University, was awarded a Vice Chancellor’s Commendation and the 2023 Niall Lucy Award for research excellence. Their advocacy and leadership roles were recognised by a WA Youth Award for ‘Creative Contributions’ to the state.

Lelia Green has been researching young peoples’ lives online since 2002 and has significant experience in working with adolescents and their parents, both in Australian and international contexts. Green has authored and co-edited many books on children, young people and digital media, including “Digitising Early Childhood” (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019), “The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children” (Routledge, 2021) and “Digital Media Use in Early Childhood: Birth to Six” (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Lelia has been a chief investigator on 2 related Australian Research Council (ARC) Centres of Excellence, 6 related ARC Discovery Grants, including this one, and a recently awarded ARC Linkage Project to craft teen-informed porn literacy materials. She is Professor of Communications in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia and a Chief Investigator with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

Dr Claire Fitzpatrick (she/her) is a Lecturer in Communications in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University, Australia. Her research sits at the intersection of political communications, deliberative democracy, and feminist digital activism, with a particular focus on how social media networks both enable and constrain political behaviour. Using mixed-methods approaches, she examines the role of digital platforms in shaping civic engagement, counterpublics, and pathways to individual, activist, and regulatory action. Drawing on critical feminist perspectives, Claire explores how power, inequality, and representation shape experiences of digital technologies, online participation, and social change. Her current research investigates social media-based civic networking spaces and 'youth-coded' communications, exploring their capacity to foster democratic engagement while critically examining the technological, political, and regulatory conditions that shape participation online. She is particularly interested in student-led civic media initiatives that create new opportunities for participation beyond traditional democratic institutions. Claire's interdisciplinary teaching, informed by her research on politics and media, gender and race, social movements, and the digital lives of young people, is grounded in a reflexive pedagogical approach that encourages students to critically engage with contemporary political and social issues across both digital and offline contexts.

Professor Jessica Ringrose, PhD (York University, Toronto) (She/Her) is co-Director of the Centre for Sociology of Education and Equity at UCL Institute of Education, London. She is a Canadian Feminist Sociologist who has lived and worked in the UK for 22 years, informing policy and practice across sectors of education, communications, health and justice. Her work promotes children's rights and voice with current funded research looking at adolescence & AI chatbots; the impact of smartphone banning at school & home, and young people's experiences of tech facilitated gender-based violence (including deepfakes, sextortion, non-consensual sexting, image based abuse, misogyny and transphobia).  She has co-produced educational interventions to build better online safety and media literacy, which have reached hundreds of thousands of young people, and are featured by UNESCO Health and Education Resource Centre. Her research was used in the UK Online Safety Act to inform the creation of a new cyberflashing offence. She has collaborated on internationally funded research projects in Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Sweden and was the co-chair of the International Gender and Education Association from 2015-2020 and she was the recipient of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Distinguished Contributions to Gender Equity in Education Award in 2020. Her latest book, Teens, Social Media and Image Based Abuse is out now (open access) with Palgrave.

Dr Sian Tomkinson is a research officer in Edith Cowan University's School of Arts and Humanities. Sian’s background is in media and communication, with a focus on game and gender studies. Sian completed her PhD on gender and video games, recently published as the monograph "Video games and gender assemblages: understanding #Gamergate and beyond". Sian is working and has published on projects including why players enjoy certain games and what impact these games have on attitudes and behaviours; how game design can impact communities of play, and online toxicity. Sian is also working on projects about the manosphere and digital intimacy.

Dr Giselle Woodley is a Lecturer/Research Fellow in the School of Arts and Humanities at Edith Cowan University in Australia and is a sexologist with a background in Arts and Media. Giselle explores issues pertaining to sexuality, sexual violence, pornography, sexuality education, intimate communications, AI, image-based abuse, digital censorship and young people. Giselle is particularly interested in the benefits of Relationships and Sexuality Education and real solutions that work in relation to these issues, which ultimately increase individual wellbeing, support healthy relationships, and reduce sexual violence.

Giselle is the Postdoctoral Research Fellow associated with this project and is also a chief investigator on an ARC Linkage project to co-design a pornography literacy education with teens.