Professor Heather Horst

Director

Heather Horst
Professor Heather A. Horst is the Director of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. A sociocultural anthropologist by training, she researches material culture and the mediation of social relations through digital media and technology. Her books focused upon these themes include The Cell Phone: An Anthropology of Communication (Horst and Miller, 2006); Hanging Around, Messing Around and Geeking Out: Kids Living and Learning with New Media (Ito, et. Al 2010); Digital Anthropology (Horst and Miller, eds. 2012); Digital Ethnography: Principles and Practices (Pink, Horst, et. Al. 2015); The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography (Hjorth, Horst, Galloway and Bell, Eds. 2016); The Moral Economy of Mobile Phones: Pacific Island Perspectives (Foster and Horst, eds. 2018) and Location Technologies in International Context (Wilken, Goggin and Horst, eds. 2019). Her current research, part of an ARC Linkage Project led by Dr. Denis Crowdy with the Wontok Foundation and Further Arts Vanuatu, examines the circulation of music in Melanesia through mobile technologies. She is also developing new work examining the Fijian fashion system as well as Automated Decision Making.

Qualifications

Selected Publications

Wilken, K, Goggin, G & Horst, H (eds) 2019, Location technologies in international context, Routledge, London.

Foster, R & Horst, H (eds) 2018, The moral economy of mobile phones: Pacific perspectives (opens in a new window), ANU Press, Acton (Open Access).

Pink, S, Horst, H, Postill, J, Hjorth, L, Lewis, T & Tacchi, J 2016, Digital ethnography: principles and practice, Sage, London.

Horst, H & Miller, D (eds) 2012, Digital Anthropology, Berg, London.

Ito, M, Baumer, S, Bittanti, M, boyd, d, Cody, R, Herr-Stephenson, B, Horst, H, Lange, P, Mahendran, D, Martinez, K, Pascoe, CJ, Perkel, D, Robinson, L, Sims, C & Tripp 2010, Hanging out, messing around and geeking out: kids living and learning with new media, MIT Press, Cambridge. Second edition published in 2019. (Open Access)

Horst, H, Miller, D 2006, The cell phone: an Anthropology of communication, Berg, London.

Pink, S, Lanzeni, D & Horst, H 2018, ‘Data anxieties: finding trust in everyday digital mess’, Big Data & Society, vol. 5, no. 1, doi:10.1177/2053951718756685

Horst, H & Taylor, EB 2014, ‘The role of mobile phones in the mediation of border crossings: a study of Haiti and the Dominican Republic’, The Australian Journal of Anthropology, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 155–170, doi:10.1111/taja.12086

Horst, H 2013, ‘The infrastructures of mobile media: towards a future research agenda’, Mobile Media & Communication, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 147–152, doi:10.1177/2050157912464490

Horst, H 2006, ‘The blessings and burdens of communication: cell phones in Jamaican transnational social fields’, Global Networks, vol. 6, no. 2, pp. 143–159, doi:10.1111/j.1471-0374.2006.00138.x

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