Kim McNamara was Catharine Lumby’s first PhD student. She enrolled in 1999 and researched the world of celebrities, paparazzi, social media and brand cultures. As Lumby recalled, “In the early days of the department, we worked collaboratively to build a strong research culture. We intentionally wanted to be working with people who were committed to research and who were emerging researchers.”

At the beginning, the MECO Higher Degree Research (HDR) program attracted mainly mid-career journalists and people in other areas of media and communications who had worked in the industry but wanted to complete a PhD and move into academia. As Lumby said, “It was the beginning in a shift towards seeing media and communications as a research-driven discipline, not just a vocation. Though the vocational and professional aspects are very important. A lot of the PhDs were ones that integrated reflection on professional practice and brought that into the research space.”

Megan Le Masurier’s thesis about Cleo magazine, which she started in 2000, was typical of the kind of PhD that Lumby and later her colleagues started to supervise. As a senior editor at a women’s magazine and a feminist, Le Masurier was interested in exploring the idea that some feminists saw women’s magazines as always trivial and sexist. Lumby recounted the project: “And Megan said, ‘no, it’s more complicated than that’. She went back and researched the early years of Cleo magazine, which Ita Buttrose edited, and she said that actually Cleo was a feminist magazine. It just talked about it in popular terms. It was in the early days in the 70s, where average women in Australia who wouldn’t identify as feminist were curious about, what is this women’s liberation, how will it affect my life? So to me it is an example of really important historically archival research that takes a popular magazine seriously, and says it did real work in real women’s lives. While the ‘radical women’ who marched on the streets were crucial to the feminist movement, they weren’t always presenting their message in a relatable way. Cleo ‘translated feminism for a much broader audience’.”

For Lumby, the objective in the early days of the HDR program was to bring together a group of talented research students, like Le Masurier and McNamara, give them resources, mentor and support them, and allow a research culture to develop. As MECO was forging a new space in communications research, “what happened was rhizomatic – networks and different branches of ideas formed organically throughout. And HDR students were a critical part of the MECO family. We involved them and engaged them in research projects, and brainstorming sessions about what was this research culture? What were we doing in this space?”

The life of an HDR student, and their supervisor, was different in the early 2000s compared to now. Academics were allowed a lot more discretion and the supervision process was far less bureaucratic. Lumby said, “This was easier for the supervisor and easier for the student. And I think it allowed us to spend more time on the actual work of making the PhD happen. These days students frequently complain to me, and maybe to other academics, that they spend a lot of time reporting and filling in paperwork. And they prefer to be working on their work.” While she recognised the benefits of greater accountability, she added, “More generally, we’ve become very corporatised. And that means that there are a lot of layers of bureaucracy to everything that we do. And sometimes that can get in the way of doing the work. It actually puts some people off doing a PhD, which is a shame, because ultimately it’s a creative work. It’s a brave endeavour, and it’s a journey that the supervisor and the students embark on together. And there’s no one size fits all to supervision. People work differently. They have different needs. They need different kinds of support.” The scholarships available at the university level were always scarce and competitive, hence most MECO HDR students did not receive one – a situation that continues today.

Pastoral support was a key element of the HDR supervision. While there was less bureaucracy to contend with in the early days of MECO, HDR students had the usual universal challenges associated with working on a huge project, which affects a significant part of student life and impacts their family and friends. Lumby, Anne Dunn and Steven Maras worked closely on supporting students through the process. This was particularly important for those younger students who came straight out of an undergraduate degree. Apart from the cohort of industry professionals, the HDR program also drew on the strong, academically gifted honours cohort.

Lumby said they always worked “from the person to the thesis”, not the other way around. She added, “I think that philosophy is still there in the MECO department, that we are academically rigorous, but we put people first and that to me is at the heart of good supervision and at the heart of caring for our HDR community, because I see them as our colleagues, and therefore, they need to be listened to and often they're doing research at the cutting edge of where the field is going. So, we learn from them.”

As MECO grew, the HDR program evolved. A role of HDR coordinator was established to administer the program effectively, which meant helping students progress while maintaining good relations with supervisors. HDR coordinators scheduled reviews and organised events to facilitate the progress of HDR students to completion. The role was undertaken first by Dunn, followed by Maras (2007–11), Penny O’Donnell (2011–13), Joyce Nip (2014–16), Benedetta Brevini (2017–19) and, more recently, Jonathon Hutchinson (2019–22).

Dunn had an unerring capacity to recruit high-quality candidates. Maras organised the administration of policy, degree information, admissions, supervision, communications, submission and examination with characteristic verve and diligence. He set up a mini-conference in 2007 to coincide with annual reviews. The conference provided an occasion for students to share their research with their peers and the broader MECO community.

O’Donnell took the role in a new direction, by introducing fortnightly “research-in-conversation” meetings to increase HDR communicational skills development. Students were invited to set the agenda by nominating the themes, readings or issues they wanted to discuss and, within a short timeframe, the HDR research culture became more collegial and intellectually rewarding. Some examples of topics covered include “The pace and flow of academic writing”, “Your PhD is a career”, “Embracing the challenge of becoming a writer”, “Ten tips for failing a PhD”, “The bibliography challenge”, “How not to write a thesis”, “The ethics of research”, “The university as an intellectual community”, “Peer review”, “How to apply for a Postgraduate Research Support grant”, “Planning the end game”, “Social media and PhD research”, “Research principles”, and the all-time favourite topic, “Dancing and wrestling with scholarship”.1

By the 2012 end-of-year HDR mini-conference, many students were better-placed to present a 20-minute research presentation. That was a great outcome. O’Donnell was invited, along with Gerard Goggin (then head of department), to run an “enhancing graduate culture” workshop for the School of Literature, Arts and Media (SLAM).

During Nip’s time as HDR coordinator, she sought to refine MECO’s approach to the required Postgraduate Research Annual Progress Reviews. Nip added a second, mid-year annual review, held in conjunction with an additional mini-conference, to better administer the probation of students who start their studies in the middle of the academic year. She also organised orientation briefings and welcome events for new students, as well as workshops on special topics targeted at students at different stages of candidature (in addition to University-wide initiatives such as HDR Student Connect Event and Pitch Perfect: Present Your Thesis in 3 Minutes).

Following the merge of MECO and Digital Cultures in 2013, bringing together research students with diverse topic interests became a priority. As Brevini said, from a theoretical and methodological perspective it was easy to merge them. But the merge required a framework to make it happen. Brevini also wanted to create a stronger connection between the honours program, master’s by research and the PhD program.

As the department grew, the HDR enrolments grew too. As noted earlier, the first two PhD students started in 1999 and 2000; they were joined by the first master’s by research student a year later. The first three students graduated in 2006. The numbers grew each year and in 2010, there were 24 PhD students and nine master’s students going through the program. Two years later, in 2012, MECO recorded its highest number of students, with 40 HDR enrolled candidates in total. This number dropped to a low of 21 students in 2020 and rose again to 29 in 2022. The first international master’s student started in 2006, and the first three international PhD students started in 2007. Since then, MECO has enrolled international students of 18 nationalities, with the greatest numbers coming from China, followed by Indonesia, the UK, New Zealand, Germany and India.

To improve communication with a growing cohort of students, and create a sense of community, Nip set up an email list and eCommunity site on Blackboard. Building on these initiatives, Brevini established a mandatory research seminar held fortnightly, at which students would give updates on their own work and hear from MECO staff and guest speakers about the intricacies of conference planning, abstract writing and becoming a researcher. She also encouraged HDR students to attend the Media@Sydney seminar series to further participate in the research culture of the department.

Brevini also played a pivotal role in replacing the two small mini-conferences associated with the reviews with an annual conference for HDR students. “So everybody had to be there. Everybody had to present the paper. Everybody had to come to support their peers. And in this way, everybody knew that the conference was happening in November, they could plan towards it.” It was another opportunity to strengthen the HDR community, because as Brevini said, “University is not just about making people job ready. It’s about teaching them how to be humans and teaching them how to be citizens, how to be together in a community that is separated from the market and is not judged only on market values but it is judged on what you’re bringing, how you can enrich yourself; the kind of knowledge you can share and affect.”

Another initiative that aimed to foster closer working relationships among students and staff was the MECO HDR Pomodoro writing group that Hutchinson initiated in November 2019. The idea was to have a mix of academics and HDR students from MECO attending, but generally the meetings attracted more students than staff. Hutchinson wanted this to be a student-led initiative, so invited Michael Ward and Agata Stepnik to take over the organisation and hosting duties. The group initially met in person, but since the COVID-19 lockdowns in April–May 2020, the meetings have been conducted online. Hutchinson also experimented with fortnightly research symposium/book clubs, giving students a chance to have their work read, for all to work on an article, chapter or book together, and to update each other on research developments in the previous fortnight.

While these initiatives were developed at the departmental level, in the background the University was working on reforms to introduce coursework, streamline the administrative process and manage the HDR cohort, which became the HDR Policy 2020. Inspired by the model coming from the Faculty of Science, the University wanted to require PhD students to complete two units to develop their research skills. While in theory this model was a great idea, Brevini found the timing problematic. She said, “it is all good that they are trained, but they should be trained before they start the PhD because in three years, they won’t have enough time for both coursework and research”. Nevertheless, the coursework became compulsory for students from 2021.

The University also introduced a compulsory supervisor training course, a University-wide register of supervisors, and the need to have co-supervised two master’s or PhD students to completion before they can take a lead supervisor role. Moreover, supervisors cannot take on more than five concurrent students.

A new University-wide online system to improve the administration of reviews was trialled at MECO in 2017, which has since been replaced by a new system. While there are efficiency benefits in having a central platform, the trend towards centralisation had been opposed by many academics in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences who saw the disciplinary differences as a problem for managing the reviews. Eventually, the school decided to have a layer of reviews managed at the departmental level, as disciplinary knowledge is critical for recruitment of new HDR students, though most of the coordination is managed at the school level as part of the new policy. While the MECO HDR coordinator previously filtered out enquiries on topics unrelated to research done at MECO before sending them out to colleagues to find a suitable supervisor, these days a MECO HDR Admissions Committee reviews applications. This collective effort aims to improve the quality of applicants and align the HDR intake with the research trajectory of the department by targeting areas that MECO is interested in pursuing.

Not everyone sees the effort to follow a specific research agenda as a positive development though. Brevini pointed to a difference between the way a department and a research institute should operate. “If you’re working in a research institute, it’s all well and fine to push through the research agenda of the institute. But if you work in a department, you should pursue diversity of research.”

Not surprisingly, as the diversity of research interest among MECO staff has increased, the range of HDR topics has grown as well. At the beginning, there was a lot of research in media and journalism. Over time, as staff in Digital Cultures expanded, students started doing more research on video games, for example, which Brevini saw as a positive development. “If you have a diverse cohort of expertise, then you can take different PhD students. But the discipline in terms of the theory, the theoretical aspects and the methodology, are still the same. So when we train them, we train them with the same tools.”

Over the years, MECO has hosted numerous outstanding HDR students who have gone on to successful careers in academia and beyond. For example, Christy Dena (2009) investigated the nature of transmedia practice in her PhD. She is a storyteller, educator and researcher, and currently part-time professor of cross-media and interactive narratives at the Norwegian Film School. Joe Brennan (2014), a highly acclaimed photographer and writer, looked at theory and practice of slash manips, visual fan works that layer images of male characters from popular media with gay material. Lukasz Swiatek (2015) looked at the world of accolades such as the Nobel Prize as media and communications entities; he is now a lecturer in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW. Lucy Watson (2019) investigated celebrity culture and the ways in which LGBTQ+ Australians read celebrity media. She is now policy and development officer at ACON, a health-promotion organisation specialising in HIV prevention and support and LGBTQ+ health. Cherry Baylosis (2021) interrogated the potential of voice in digital media for people living with mental illness. She is now working as a policy officer with Disability Advocacy NSW.

In October 2021, Marcus Carter, Goggin and Ben Egliston were successful in securing the FASS HDR Scholarship for their project exploring VR and disability as part of the Mixed Reality Ethics Project and the Socio-Tech Futures Lab. This was a welcome development in the otherwise bleak two years of the pandemic, which saw many HDR students struggle to continue their studies. Some couldn’t pursue their research in lockdowns because they had extra caring responsibilities or other hindrances. Many missed out on opportunities to travel to conferences and network. All students were permitted to extend their candidature by six months.

The work on finetuning the HDR processes has continued. At the end of February 2021, the Annual Progress Review process was retired and replaced by Progress Evaluations, with specific progression milestones. The role of HDR coordinator at the departmental level has been replaced by school HDR coordinators tasked with remaining in close contact with MECO students, including all pastoral care. The focus remains on building a strong research community and culture.

​Works cited