Dr June Lennie

Biography

Background:  Dr June Lennie is a Senior Research Associate in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT.  June  held senior research positions on several major action research, evaluation and consulting projects in the Creative Industries Faculty and the Faculty of Business at QUT from 1990 - 2005 and from 2007 onwards.  They include projects conducted in close partnership with government, non-government, international agencies, and community participants. The focus of her research work has included:

•  the evaluation of Communication for Development programs and projects
•  developing participatory methodologies, toolkits  and other resources for the evaluation of community-based IT and C4D initiatives
•  evaluation capacity development
•  rural women's empowerment through action research and other processes that include the use of  new media and interactive communication technologies
•  gender and power in community participation processes
•  the social impacts of technologies

Recent research and consulting projects include:

•  Assessing Communication for Social Change: A New Approach to Impact Assessment which developed and trialled a participatory methodology for assessing the social change impacts of radio programs made by Equal Access Nepal. This ARC Linkage project was conducted from 2007 - 2011 in partnership with Equal Access International, Equal Access Nepal and the University of Adelaide.
•  Design and development of an Inter-agency Resource Pack for Researching, Monitoring and Evaluating C4D for use by UN agencies and their partners. This included a major literature review and consultations with a global panel of experts and UN specialists (see  http://www.unicef.org/cbsc/) This consulting project was conducted from 2010-2011 in close collaboration with UNICEF, New York.
• An ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship project conducted from 2000-2004 that successfully built community capacities in evaluating rural IT initiatives and designed a participatory process for evaluating these initiatives (see www.evaluateit.org).

June has authored over 50 publications, including

•   over 20 refereed papers in journals and national and international conference proceedings
•   invited book chapters
•   major research and evaluation reports
•   co-author of Action Research and New Media (Hampton Press, 2009)
•   PhD thesis: A feminist evaluation and critique of a rural women and communication technologies project.

She is currently working on the book Evaluating Communication for Development: A Framework for Social Change, to be published by Routledge Earthscan in 2012 (co-authored with Professor Jo Tacchi from RMIT University).