Larvatus Prodeo

Mark Bahnisch is a Sociologist who has previously lectured at at Griffith University and The University of Queensland. He is now lecturing in the Faculty of Creative Industries at QUT, and works as a Researcher in the Smart Services CRC. He also teaches writing in the School of Arts at Griffith.

Mark has an undergraduate degree in history and politics from UQ, and postgraduate qualifications in sociology, industrial relations and political economy from Griffith and QUT. He has recently submitted his PhD thesis through the Humanities Program at QUT.

He has published on political communication and new media, political and social theory, Australian and international politics, the sociology of deviance, industrial relations, organisational sociology and sociology of religion. He has over ten years’ experience in tertiary teaching, and as well as teaching in creative industries, management, sociology and political science, has taught philosophy of social science, and quantitative and qualitative methods at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

He has also worked in community organisations and the public sector, and has consulted to the Australian and Queensland Governments as well as private, public and arts/media sector organisations. His areas of consulting expertise include web 2.0 and online research, social attitudes research, workforce planning and analysis, organisational analysis, gender equity, and public policy.

He is a Fellow of the Centre for Policy Development.

As well as some 35 academic papers (including 2 book chapters and 2 journal articles published in the US and the UK), Mark has contributed opinion pieces to a range of international and domestic publications, including The Australian Financial Review, The Australian, Business Spotlight, Overland, and The Griffith Review.

Mark writes regularly for New Matilda, On Line Opinion, Inside Story and Crikey, and covered the 2006 Queensland election campaign for them.

Without straying too far from home, Mark recently debuted as a travel writer, authoring the Insiders’ Guide to Brisbane for Ninemsn.

Mark has been invited to speak at a number of conferences on blogging, politics and new media, including The National Young Writers’ Festival, New Realities: Beyond Broadcasting for management and staff of the ABC in October 2006 and the Australian Blogging Conference in September 2007 organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation and QUT, and at their Creating Value: Between Commons and Commerce conference in June 2008. He also spoke on a panel on politics and new media at the 2006 Byron Bay Writers’ Festival. He was an invited keynote speaker at the opening of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism’s Public Right to Know conference in November 2007 at UTS. In 2008, he was an invited panelist at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism event and in 2009 he will be involved in the Brisbane Ideas Festival and the Brisbane CitySmart Innovation Festival.

He has been interviewed on the sociology of blogging for print and on radio, and contributed a chapter in 2006 on political blogging to the first internationally published academic book on blogs, The Uses of Blogs.

In 2008, he was a semi-regular radio commentator on current affairs on 4zzz fm’s Brisbane Line program.

Something of a libertarian morphing into a social democrat with a preference for non-statist solutions, he likes his political debate to be reasoned but passionate.

He can be contacted at mbahnisch at gmail dot com

And there’s the obligatory Facebook profile.