Dr Mark Bahnisch is a Sociologist who has previously lectured in the former School of Humanities and Human Services and the School of Management at QUT, in the School of Social Science at 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 and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Medicine 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.
He has recently been a co-author of major public policy and research reports for Health Workforce Australia, and in 2011 led a project as Chief Investigator on organisational change, communication and workforce competencies on behalf of Clinical Education Queensland for the then Wide Bay Health Services District. His contribution to reform of Queensland industrial relations laws to enshrine pay equity under the Beattie Labor Government was commended by the QIRC, and his work on women’s career choices highlighted by the then Equal Opportunity for Women Agency as best practice.
He is currently employed as a Sessional Academic in the Griffith Business School and a Sessional Lecturer in the School of Population Health at The University of Queensland and spends his remaining time on consultancy and writing. His most recent project, with colleagues in the Centre for Social Research in Energy and Resources at the University of Newcastle, examines social licence to operate and communications within the unconventional gas industry. This consultancy, contracted by the Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council to the Australian Council of Learned Academies, forms part of the ‘Securing Australia’s Future‘ programme. Last year, he advised The Australia Institute on the dissemination of research and curation of public conversation.
None of his writing on this site represents the opinions of his employers or entities that contract his services 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. His dissertation was titled ‘The Phenomenology of Utopia: Reimagining the Political‘. The thesis was nominated by one examiner for an ‘Outstanding University Thesis Award’. He will be presenting a paper based on this research at the Governance and the Utopian Imagination conference organised by the Public Administration Theory Network in San Francisco in June 2013.
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 sixteen 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 38 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. As Director of FAQ Research, Mark led a partnership with Crikey covering the issues around Coal Seam Gas in the 2012 Queensland election, Behind the Seams.
Without straying too far from home, Mark debuted as a travel writer in 2008, 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. He featured on a panel at the Walkley Foundation Conference in Brisbane in 2011, What’s the Story? Inventing the Future.
In 2011 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. In 2012, he gave an invited presentation in Melbourne at a Symposium organised by RMIT and the University of Salford on Disaster Management and Resilience. He will be talking on similar issues at a reprise of the Eidos event, this time a National Conference, in April this year.
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. He published on blogging and the 2007 election in the Pacific Journalism Review.
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
Mark is on Twitter. His professional and academic work is profiled at LinkedIn and Academia.edu.
