Welcome to our 2026-27 Visiting Fellow, Professor Amelia Johns, School of Communication at University of Technology Sydney

Amelia Johns is Associate Professor of Digital and Social Media in the School of Communication at University of Technology Sydney. Her work spans the fields of social media, digital literacy and safety, with a particular focus on LGBTQIA+ and migrant communities’ digital expressions, literacy, safety practices and trust/mistrust in their engagement with social media and other platforms. This research has been recognised with a Google Trust & Safety Award (2024) for the project ‘Building co-designed digital literacy campaigns and resources to combat LGBTQ+ misinformation and hate speech’ where she is working closely with LGBTQIA+ advocacy organisations in Malaysia to co-create a digital safety hub for community and organisers. She is author of several books, including her recent book ‘WhatsApp: from a one-to-one communication app to a global communication platform’ (2024), published with Polity Press.

As part of her visiting fellowship at MMU, she is conducting a pilot research project with a team of researchers from UNSW, Swinburne and Latrobe University in Australia, which is seeking to learn about the kinds of relationships and emotional connections that people form with conversational Gen AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. The pilot project, titled Electric Dreams: Sharing experiences of emotional engagement with conversational AI is part of a broader interest Johns has in bringing a queer and post digital intimacies lens to current dystopian or utopian discourses where humanity is perceived to be either at stake or liberated by AI. In doing so, the research she is undertaking aims to engage with a messier everydayness where AI systems mediate intimacy in ways which disrupt limiting discourses and normative beliefs around what constitutes intimacy and the good life.