Rob Cover

RMIT University, School of Media and Communication, Faculty Member

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Professor of Digital Communication, RMIT University (Melbourne);
Director, RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre.

Rob is a media and cultural studies scholar who researches digital and screen cultures in relation to (i) young people’s health, mental health and wellbeing, (ii) minorities, migrants and gender- and sexually-diverse subjects and social change, (iii) online adversity, hostility and abuse. He is Chief Investigator on a number of major funded research projects, including an Australian Research Council Discovery Project "Representation of Gender and Sexual Diversity in Australian Film and Television, 1990-2010" " (2018-2023) an ARC Linkage Project "LGBTQ Migration" (2020-2024) investigating the relationship between gender/sexual diversity and internal migration in Australia, and an ARC Discovery Project "“Addressing Online Hostility in Australian Digital Cultures” (2023-2026). He has worked with Australian and international governments on a range of research projects, including in relation to COVID-19 health communication campaigns, and on the online abuse of public figures.

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Digital harms: Consistency in definition, understanding and action

Analysis & Policy Observatory, Mar 15, 2026

This interdisciplinary concept paper examines the scale of digital harm, explains why current res... more This interdisciplinary concept paper examines the scale of digital harm, explains why current responses fall short and proposes reframing harm through a shared, multi‑sector, internationally relevant taxonomy. It argues such a framework is essential for effective reform and offers recommendations for governments, platforms, researchers and civil society to guide coordinated action and strengthen accountability across the digital ecosystem. Digital harms include abuse, harassment, bullying, hate speech, disinformation, doxxing, image-based abuse, deepfakes, illicit promotion of harmful productions, scams and other adversarial practices. Recommendations 1. Develop a shared global taxonomy of digital harms. 2. Ground definitions in injury and ecological harm. 3. Use the taxonomy to drive prevention and education. 4. Address the inter-platform and interjurisdictional reality of harm.

Reporting online abuse to platforms: Factors, interfaces and the potential for care

Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Mar 12, 2025

Evidence suggests that the rate of reporting abuse, harassment and problematic content to platfor... more Evidence suggests that the rate of reporting abuse, harassment and problematic content to platforms is substantially low. This article assesses the extent to which platform interfaces may contribute to discouraging the use of reporting as a remedy to online harms. Using a walkthrough method, we analyse reporting interfaces for the extent to which they may contribute to a lack of trust in reporting. The study found that reporting interfaces (1) did not provide appropriate access to platform policy or guidelines, (2) failed to provide options for dialogue, testimonials or mechanisms to report in formats supporting user wellbeing needs, (3) were consistently framed as individualising and transactional rather than brokering care or peer support, and (4) added to the opacity of platform intervention and decision-making processes. We argue the available interfaces do not do enough to protect users from digital harms.

Emergent Identities

Routledge eBooks, Sep 13, 2018

Introduction: Queer Youth Suicide, Vulnerability and Unliveable Lives

Interactivity, Digital Media, and the Text

This chapter shifts the focus of questions of identity and media from traditional to new media, a... more This chapter shifts the focus of questions of identity and media from traditional to new media, and establishes a background for scholars and readers to understand some of the complex ways in which identity is formed and constituted in today’s online environment. Here we examine the ways in which recent theorizations of interactivity work to reconceive the author–text–audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms – historical and contemporary – can be reconceptualized in light of recent understandings of interactivity, it is argued that control over the text and its narrative as a mythically “finished” product is split between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire for control over the arrangement, (re)configuration and (re)distribution of the text. This struggle takes place across the sites of technological developments of textual control versus full interactivity, and in the realms of both media theory and media law.

Undoing attitudes: subjectivity and ethical change in the<i>Go Back to Where You Came From</i>documentary

Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Mar 7, 2013

In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the... more In the context of Australian debates about refugees and asylum seekers, this article examines the relationship between attitude, as a performative articulation of selfhood, and ethics of non-violence and welcome. Exploring how attitude change has been represented in the narrative of the Go Back To Where You Came From documentary, it is argued that attitude is a concept indelibly fixed within discourses of refugee arrivals in Australia and attitude change regularly posited as the process towards ethics. An example of attitude change in the documentary is discussed through Butler's ethics of non-violence and the ways in which recognition and the recognizability of the other operate to promote or stem an ethical responsiveness or welcome. This is followed by looking at how the Butler's account of frames as the social and political mechanisms that can prevent the recognition of the other as human or worthy of hospitality can be expanded to show how the production of an ethical relationship is aided by a disturbance in selfhood such that a subject can recognize his or her own vulnerability and hence the vulnerability of the other. How an expanded theory of ethics and hospitality plays out through attitude change is highlighted.

Changing Channels: Scheduling, Temporality, New Technologies (And The Future Of 'Television' In Media Studies)

This paper argue that the processes of digitisation and a user-based taste for interactivity have... more

Populist contestations: Cultural change and the competing languages of sexual and gender identity

Sexualities, Dec 23, 2020

There has been a vast proliferation of categories, descriptors and labels used to describe gender... more There has been a vast proliferation of categories, descriptors and labels used to describe gender and sexual identity over the past few years, with terms now numbering in the hundreds. Many terms, such as heteroflexible, asexual, demigirl and sapiosexual actively contest masculine/feminine and hetero/homo binary arrangements of identity, and LGBTQ minority rights discourses and arguably represent an epochal shift in gender/sexual knowledge frameworks. The cultural conditions that make such change possible have yet to be explored. This paper draws on theoretical approaches to populism to analyse the role of popular culture, digital communication and contestation of institutional and expert knowledges in driving the emergence of new gender and sexual terminology.

Education and affinity? pedagogies of sexual citizenship in LGBTIQ youth support videos

Journal of Youth Studies, Mar 15, 2019

ABSTRACT This article provides an analysis of some of the ways in which educational resources for... more ABSTRACT This article provides an analysis of some of the ways in which educational resources for youth frame identity, sexuality and normativity within broader contexts of support and sexual citizenship. It focuses on online video resources for young people produced in Australia by the LGBTIQ support and curriculum advocacy organisation Safe Schools Coalition Australia and by the Minus18 Foundation. Developed as part of the larger All of Us educational package, these videos are explicitly pedagogical, presenting the viewer with ‘real life’ experiences from a range of young Australians. We consider the work the All of Us videos do in engaging with concepts of sexual citizenship, particularly as they seek to help young people navigate multiple forms of belonging and support. Of special interest is a series of tensions between normalising tendencies and the complexification of identities, communities, intimacies and belongings. While the videos may be perceived to operate within largely normative conceptualisations of sexuality, they explore ways of building affinity, peer support, and alternative ways of being that extend well beyond the logics usually offered by these frameworks.

Memorialising queer community: digital media, subjectivity and the Lost Gay # archives of social networking

Media International Australia, Nov 23, 2017

Following the development of online sites dedicated to the preservation of individuals’ photograp... more Following the development of online sites dedicated to the preservation of individuals’ photographic and textual memorialisation of cities, a number of archiving sites using Facebook have been developed that cater to the interactive and co-creative practice of memorialising LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) city-based communities, events and public spaces (e.g. Lost Gay Perth and Lost Gay Melbourne). Such minority community practices of memorialisation invoke deeply felt and affective attachments to ‘past’ in ways which have implications for identity, belonging, ageing and agency. This article utilises a critical approach to archiving, temporality, identity and attachment to interrogate some of the ways in which digital cultural practices related to archiving social networking sites are implicated in the memorialisation of community belonging through notions of past, networks of knowing, and the temporal and historical production of ways of thinking about and knowing minority sexuality, particularly LGBTQ subjectivity.

Marriage Equality: Two Generations of Gender and Sexually Diverse Australians

Australian Feminist Studies, Jan 2, 2020

ABSTRACT Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliber... more ABSTRACT Marriage equality is routinely located as evidencing a domestic, non-radical or neoliberal approach to sexual diversity. This article questions such assumptions by highlighting the reflexive approach to the utility of marriage and the significant diversity of opinion and attitudes towards marriage equality among gender- and sexually-diverse Australians. It does so by drawing on a major study of two social generations of gender- and sexually-diverse Australians’ conducted in the lead-up to a controversial postal survey on same-sex marriage in 2017. In the survey many participants discussed their views on marriage equality, its benefits, and how they saw its relationship or relevance to their own lives. This article identifies four themes present in participants’ responses: (1) the personal and domestic importance of marriage equality to some participants; (2) the social and political affordances of marriage equality for LGBTQ+ persons in Australia more generally; (3) the apparently unremarkable status of marriage equality for some participants; and (4) continuing deep ambivalence about marriage equality for others.

Isolated and suicidal

Becoming and Belonging: Performativity, Subjectivity, and the Cultural Purposes of Social Networking

Performing and undoing identity online: Social networking, identity theories and the incompatibility of online profiles and friendship regimes

Convergence, Mar 1, 2012

This article aims to expand the critical frameworks by which online social networking can be cont... more This article aims to expand the critical frameworks by which online social networking can be contextualised and understood within the broader cultural practices of identity and selfhood. Utilising Judith Butler’s theories of performative identity, it is argued that the use of social networking sites are performative acts in and of themselves. Two facets of social networking are examined from theoretical and critical perspectives: (1) the use of social networking profiles (Info pages, taste selections, biographies) as a tool for performing, developing and stabilising identity as a narrative in line with cultural demands for coherence, intelligibility and recognition; (2) identity performances that occur through relationality among online friends through list maintenance and communication (wall posts, tagging, commentary), and how identity is reconfigured within a network morphology. Finally, the article aims to open discussion around the broad cultural practices and implications of online social networking by developing some theoretical approaches to understanding the incompatibilities between these two facets which compete and risk the ‘undoing’ of online identity coherence. Within the framework of the growing use of social networking sites as one area in which our selfhood and subjectivity are performed, this incompatibility and undoing has both risks and benefits for future the cultural production of identity.

Some Cunts: Graffiti, Globalisation, Injurious Speech and 'Owning' Signification

Social Semiotics, Dec 1, 2002

This article examines the way in which processes of signification in contemporary culture are gov... more This article examines the way in which processes of signification in contemporary culture are governed by motifs of ownershipwho has the &#x27;right&#x27; to make the &#x27;right&#x27; kind of signification, whose significatory powers can be considered to be dominant, and what sorts of ethical ...

Material/queer theory: Performativity, subjectivity, and affinity-based struggles in the culture of late capitalism

Rethinking Marxism, Jul 1, 2004

Between the early 1970s and the present, lesbian/gay or queer political intervention has been gov... more

New media theory: electronic games, democracy and reconfiguring the author–audience relationship

Social Semiotics, Aug 1, 2004

New media forms open many possibilities not only for the development of new media theory, but a... more

Queer theory, neoliberal homonormativity and social utility for queer writing on youth (suicide)

Text, Oct 31, 2015

Contemporary sexual citizenship is governed by neoliberal concepts of selfhood that both encourag... more Contemporary sexual citizenship is governed by neoliberal concepts of selfhood that both encourage subjects to manage their own risk and that establishes risks by creating hierarchies of affluence, self-commodity and belonging. These risks relate to the ways in which LGBT self-harm and sexuality-related suicide are conditioned and normalised, with continuing high rates of suicidality. While neo-liberal formations of sexual selfhood have created the conditions for writing and making sense of fictional and nonfictional narrative accounts in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific for the legalised expression and representation of non-heterosexuality, they continue and exacerbate risks that can lead to the cultural formations associated with youth suicide. The fact that non-heterosexual youth have traditionally made use of the 'logics' of non-normative sexuality given in queer writing calls for an ethical approach to the ways in which narratives of non-heteronormative sexuality are written. This article presents a framing account of how contemporary neoliberal forms of 'homonormative' queer cultures serve as a backdrop and context for queer creative representations that may be utilised as forms of support, frameworks for identity norms or projections of queer lives that can, arguably, exacerbate risks of suicide. It examines some of the ways in which we can come at the conditions that make queer youth suicide possible and thinkable from a queer culturalist angle, allowing us to consider how suicide risks are creatively represented, produced, or contributed to. Rob Cover is Associate Professor and Discipline Chair, Media and Communication, University of Western Australia. He is a CI on an ARC Discovery Project examining the conditions and frameworks of LGBT youth support. His recent books include:

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My own private parliament: media ethics, gender, popular culture and the Kernot-Evans affair

Sexualities and Advertising

Rob Cover

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