Prof Rachel Gibson

I joined the Institute for Social Change in December 2007 having held previous appointments as Professor of New Media Studies at the University of Leicester, Senior Research Fellow in the ACSPRI Centre for Social Research (ACSR) in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University and Lecturer in politics at the University of Salford. I completed my PhD thesis on the rise of anti-immigrant parties in Western Europe in the late 20th century at Texas A&M University in the US. I have also had held visiting research positions at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and at the Department of Politics, University of Durham. I have been a Principal Investigator on the Australian Election Study (AES) and the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes (AuSSA) and on a series of Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and Australian Research Council (ARC) funded projects dealing with the impact of the new media on politics. I am a member of the Editorial Board of a range of political science and new media journals including the Journal of Elections, Public Opinon and Parties, the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Information Polity and the Australian Journal of Political Science and serve as a reviewer for funding bodies including the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.

• New media, political parties and citizen participation
• The professionalisation of political campaigning
• Web linkage analysis and methodologies to map online political networks
• Design and analysis of social attitude surveys and election studies

My current research projects include development of my ongoing research into the use of new media by political organisations and candidates in campaigns and elections. I am currently examining the Australian election of 2007 and also the US Presidential election of 2008 and plan to present my work at a series of conferences and workshops during 2008. In addition, I will continue to promote the international collaborative project to establish a Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) with colleagues in Australia, the US and the UK. The aim here being to pilot a new software for social scientists to study the structure, evolution and implications of political organisations’ online networks. The project is designed to bring together key centres of e-Social Science in the US and UK and develop the web network analysis tool for remote use by researchers overseas. Finally, along with my colleague Andrea Römmele at the University of Mannheim I am also in the process of developing a Political Campaigns study network. This project is designed to promote more systematic study of the uptake and effects of new campaign techniques by political parties in elections around the world.

I teach an MSc core course on Comparative Citizen politics. Given my interests in new media, political parties, election campaigning and citizens’ online participation I am keen to explore opportunities for supervision of research students in these general topic areas.

Publications