Hello! I’m Brady, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Monash University in the School of Social Sciences. I was awarded my PhD in sociology from Griffith University in 2012. From 2013-2016 I was Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Tasmania, and in 2017 I began at Monash. From 2019-2022 I was an Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) Senior Research Fellow. I am also my School’s Research Coordinator, which means I help coordinate research efforts, strategic intiatives, the distribution of internal funds, and research strategy in one of Australia’s biggest social science schools in Australia.

My research sits between the sociology of youth and a cultural sociology of digital media. I’m interested in how young people use social media, and how social media platforms come to serve as sites of identity-work and archival memory constituted through digital traces.

My key areas of interest are:

• Digital cultures and social media
• Youth culture and youth transitions
• Gender and sexuality (LGBTQ+ issues)
• Qualitative research methods and research ethics

My doctoral research explored how young people use MySpace and Facebook to construct a reflexive sense of identity and belonging. Post-PhD, I’ve continued to study social media use, focussing on sustained long-term use amongst young people, to better understand how people reflect on and make sense of their own digital traces. This culminated in a book I wrote with Sian Lincoln called ‘Growing up on Facebook‘. I’ve also branched out into other areas of sociology, including gender and sexuality (looking at how young queer people use social media in the Scrolling Beyond Binaries project), leisure studies (exploring how tourists use social media, and the role of social media in the context of alcohol consumption and drinking cultures), and work and employment (studying the formation of ‘professional identities’ on social media, and what this means for young people’s employment futures; see the Social Media & Employment project).

See my publications page for a list of academic articles, chapters, and books, and my research projects page for a summary of research projects I’m currently involved in.

The other part of my job – which I love – is teaching. I have taught into a range of subjects in the areas of sociology, cultural and media studies, youth studies, and internet studies. I currently coordinate, lecture in and tutor for a unit called Big Ideas for Better Futures which covers a massive range of topics including racism, climate change, work and employment, moral panics, and social media. Students learn about social movements and sociological concepts, and apply these to their own ideas for the future.

Beyond teaching and research, I’m engaged in a range of service activities and professional associations. I’m a member of The Australian Sociological Association (TASA), the Consortium of Youth, Generations and Culture (CYGC), the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), and the Digital Data & Society Consortium. At Monash, with Dr Akane Kanai I co-convene the Monash Digital Cultures Research Group. I’m also an Associate Editor of the Journal of Sociology, and on the Editorial Board for the Journal of Youth Studies and the Journal of Applied Youth Studies.