Dr Sebastian Svegaard

Biography

Sebastian is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Media Research Centre  (DMRC) at the Queensland University of Technology, working under the Digital Publics program on Professor Axel Bruns's Australian Laureate Fellowship project "Determining the Drivers and Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate".

Sebastian's current research focuses on propaganda and audio-visual media, and he currently leads the project's research in these areas. He applies a fan studies lens to the issues of and in political communication, and is deeply engaged in the ways in which popular culture, fandom, and political communication overlap and intersect. As part of this, he has a special interest in the uses of audio-visual media in political communication and, in particular, the ways in which sound and music contributes to and in communication, not least where affect is concerned.

He teaches and co-coordinates the MA Communications unit Debates in Digital Culture, and has previously taught on Popular Culture, Fan Culture and Subculture, Celebrity Studies, and Introductions to Media Studies.

He holds a PhD in Media Studies from Birmingham City University (United Kingdom), where he studied the use of affect and music to communicate critical textual readings in fan-made music videos (vids). Previously, he obtained both his MA (research) and BA at the University of Copenhagen (Denmark) in the field of Musicology with a minor in history and a special study focus of gender studies.