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Professor

Rob Cover

Director, Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC)

School - Media & Communication

Orcid identifier0000-0002-8815-2126
  • Director, Digital Ethnography Research Centre (DERC)
    School - Media & Communication
  • City Campus, Australia

BIO

Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication and Director of the RMIT Digital Ethnography Research Centre. 

He leads a number of major funded research projects on digital harms, young people and wellbeing, and gender/sexuality diversity in screen contexts. The author of around one hundred journal articles and chapters, he publishes widely on topics related to digital cultures in the context of social identities, young people, suicide prevention and resilience. 

His recent books include:

  • Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Routledge 2012)
  • Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculinity and Ethics (UWAP Scholarly 2015)
  • Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (Elsevier 2016)
  • Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (Routledge, 2019)
  • Flirting in the Era of #MeToo: Negotiating Intimacies (with A Bartlett and K Clarke; Palgrave 2019)
  • Population, Mobility and Belonging: Understanding Population Concepts in Media, Culture and Society (Routledge 2020),
  • Fake News in Digital Cultures (with A Haw and JD Thompson, Emerald 2022)
  • Identity and Digital Communication: Concepts, Theories, Practices (Routledge 2023)
  • Identity in the COVID-19 Years: Communication, Crisis, and Ethics (Bloomsbury 2024)
  • Queer Memory and Storytelling: Gender and Sexually-Diverse Identities and Trans-Media Narrative (with R Prosser, Routledge 2024). 
  • Australian Queer Screens: Diversity and Social Change in Film and TV (with W Monaghan, S Richards, S McKinnon, T Pym, Bloomsbury 2026).


He is a co-editor of the following anthologies and encylopedias:

  • Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge 2019),
  • Queer Studies and Education: An International Reader (Oxford University Press, 2024)
  • The Routledge Handbook of Sexuality, Gender, Health and Rights (Routledge 2024).
  • The Elgar Encyclopedia of Queer Studies (Elgar 2025).

    His industry experience includes as a Communication strategist for the Queensland Government (2006-2007), regular consultancy work with the Western Australian, Victorian and Commonwealth Governments in Australia, and with the Hong Kong Council of Social Services, among others.

RMIT UNIVERSITY RESEARCH GROUPS MEMBERSHIP

AVAILABILITY

  • Masters Research or PhD student supervision

FIELDS OF RESEARCH (FOR)