Tessa Houghton
Assistant Professor in Media and Communication, Malaysia
Dr. Tessa J. Houghton was awarded a PhD in Media and Communication from the School of Social and Political Science, the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011. She began working at the university of Nottingham Malaysia Campus in the same year.
Her research interests are located in the nexus between political economy, social movements, and new/digital media or internet research. She has a particular theoretical interest in postmodern and agonistic reinterpretations of traditional Habermasian public sphere theory. Her doctoral thesis synthesises multiple strands of what has variously been termed postmodern, feminist, radical or agonistic public sphere theory in order to articulate a new normative public sphere theoretical lens, and applies this to the analysis of various ‘digital rights’ oriented hacktivist counterpublics. She utilises a critical discourse analytical approach to explore their counterhegemonic capabilities, and remains keenly interested in the possibilities of this school of methodology and its possibilities for analysing emergent multimodal online discourse genres such as hacktivism.