Dr Mark Bahnisch is a Sociologist who has previously lectured at QUT, The University of Queensland and in the Contemporary Society and Culture programme in the School of Humanities at Griffith University and the School of Arts and Sciences at ACU. He has worked as a Researcher in the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at The University of Queensland, as a Senior Research Officer in Health Workforce Innovation at the University of Queensland Centre for Clinical Research (UQCCR) and in the Smart Services CRC.
None of his writing on this site represents the opinions of his employers or any organisation to which he is affiliated.
Mark has an undergraduate degree in history and politics from UQ, and postgraduate qualifications in sociology, industrial relations and political economy from Griffith and QUT. He was awarded his PhD through the Humanities Program at QUT in 2009.
He has published on political communication and new media, political and social theory, Australian and international politics, the sociology of deviance, industrial relations, organisational sociology and sociology of religion. He has over ten years’ experience in tertiary teaching, and as well as teaching in creative industries, management, sociology and political science, has taught philosophy of social science, and quantitative and qualitative methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
He has worked in community organisations and the public sector, and has consulted to the Australian and Queensland Governments as well as private, public and arts/media sector organisations. His areas of consulting expertise include social media, public affairs communications and online research, social attitudes research, workforce planning and analysis, organisational analysis, gender equity, and public policy.
He is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development and an Affiliate Member of the Eidos Institute.
As well as some 35 academic papers (including 2 book chapters and 2 journal articles published in the US and the UK), Mark has contributed opinion and analysis pieces to a range of international and domestic publications, including The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, Business Spotlight, Overland, The Australian Literary Review, and Griffith Review.
Mark has written regularly for New Matilda, On Line Opinion, Inside Story and Crikey, and covered the 2006 and 2009 Queensland election campaigns for them.
Without straying too far from home, Mark recently debuted as a travel writer, authoring the Insiders’ Guide to Brisbane for Ninemsn.
Mark has been invited to speak at a number of conferences on blogging, politics and new media, including The National Young Writers’ Festival, New Realities: Beyond Broadcasting for management and staff of the ABC in October 2006 and the Australian Blogging Conference in September 2007 organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation and QUT, and at their Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce conference in June 2008. He also spoke on a panel on politics and new media at the 2006 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival.
Mark was an invited keynote speaker at the opening of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism’s Public Right to Know conference in November 2007 at UTS. In 2008, he was an invited panelist at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event. In 2009 he was a panelist at the Brisbane Ideas Festival and organised the BrisCulture event, Creative Brisbane at Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival. He was one of three Queensland Writers Centre Wordpool lecturers, speaking on “Books in the Digital Age”. He has also given a number of talks at Search Foundation events.
Most recently, he was an invited speaker at the joint Eidos Institute and ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation event in Brisbane, Social Media In Times of Crisis.
He has been interviewed on the sociology of blogging for print and on radio, and contributed a chapter in 2006 on political blogging to the first internationally published academic book on blogs, The Uses of Blogs.
In 2008, he was a semi-regular radio commentator on current affairs on 4zzz fm’s Brisbane Line program.
He can be contacted at mbahnisch at gmail dot com
And there’s the obligatory Facebook profile.
