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Dr Tim Highfield is Assistant Professor in New Media at the University of Amsterdam. From 2015–2018 he was a Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow in the DMRC studying ‘Visual Cultures of Social Media’. Tim’s research explores social and digital media, from perspectives including popular culture, politics, news and journalism, irreverence, and fandom.
He is the author of Social Media and Everyday Politics (Polity, 2016), which brings together his PhD and postdoctoral research into politics, popular culture, digital and social media, play and irreverence, activism, and Eurovision.
His research examines how the everyday and the digital, the popular and the political, the silly and the serious are interlinked; his interests include the everyday practices of popular social media, and how formats and styles from animated GIFs to humorous hashtags and joke forms are used to engage with topics ranging from the explicitly political to the mundane and personal.
His research covers diverse topics and platforms, from visual social media such as GIFs and emoji, parody accounts and jokes on Twitter, fandom, identity on Instagram (including in collaboration with Dr Tama Leaver at Curtin University), online news and political commentary from blogs to everyday social media (including through hashtags and wordplay and through the visual), and social movements’ use of digital technologies in the US and Greece (with Dr Sky Croeser at Curtin University).
Dr Highfield is a member of the Association of Internet Researchers, International Communication Association, and Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and a program committee member for the Social Media and Society conference. More information about his work can be found at http://timhighfield.net or on Twitter (@timhighfield).