Associate Professor Carmen Leong

With the Business School support, I founded the Digital Frontier Research Lab in 2024 with the purpose to facilitate partnership between researchers, organisations, government agencies and communities to generate societal impacts and address challenges posed by new and emerging technologies. My research revolves around the role of technology in economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability. My research projects include those of:

• Digital empowerment and inclusive development
• AI and creative work
• Creative economy and technology in emerging economies
• Technological design for communities disadvantaged by the systems
• Platform and digital ecosystem
• Emerging digital phenomena e.g., FinTech, Korean Wave

Projects:

Digital uplift project with Campbelltown City Council for the digitally excluded communities

In this project, which stems from my relocation to southwestern Sydney two years ago, I have taken notice of the significant digital exclusion present in the Sydney Outer West and South-West regions, as highlighted by the Australian Digital Inclusion (ADII) Index (2020). To address this issue, I contacted Campbelltown Council and initiated discussions that resulted in a contracted project that commenced in June 2023. Our primary focus is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the extent and nuances of digital exclusion within the LGA, and subsequently enhance the design of the council's online services to ensure inclusivity for all residents. Collaborating with a dedicated team of colleagues and PhD students from our school and international university, we eagerly anticipate the opportunity to contribute to this work, ultimately bolstering the reputation of our translational hub, the UNOVA. This is my modest means of giving back to the community with my expertise. This project has attracted funding of $30,000 from the council and $16,000 from UNSW UNOVA hub and UNSW Centre of Social Impact. 

Social media empowered civic engagement and social justice

Inspired by the political polarisation in Malaysia, my home country, I have been engaged in research and conversation on social media-empowered civic engagement and social justice. Since 2016, I led a team of international researchers in studying the role of technologies such as social media in facilitating Malaysia's Bersih movement for clean and fair elections. Malaysian politics is widely regarded as contentious. For years, democracy suffered from entrenched advantages enjoyed by the ruling party and the gerrymandered constituencies. My interactions with the grassroots leaders of two nongovernmental, nonpartisan grassroots groups – Global Bersih and Bersih 2.0, which won the 2016 Gwangju Prize for Human Rights for its activism – produced knowledge that was disseminated in different forms to foster rights consciousness in society. I have shown how social media can be effectively used to organise collective actions in a bottom-up manner, in contrast to movements organised by social movement organisations such as NGOs.

My study has advanced knowledge in my field of information systems through three journal publications - two in ABDC A* and one in ABDC A. One of them received Best Research Paper at Information and Organization (ABDC A*) 2021, with its impacts being recognised by the editor who said "This is an excellent research paper. It addresses a very important phenomenon concerning the dramatic rise of social media-driven social movements which have proliferated following recent crises to protest rising economic inequality." The paper also won the runner-up for the AIS Special Interest Group (SIG) of Grounded Theory Methodology’s Best Paper Award. In addition to a UNSW BusinessThink article, I also published an article in The Conversation ("Malaysia's Bersih movement shows social media can mobilise the masses"), which has recorded more than 23,000 reads. The article in the Conversation was endorsed and shared by Global Bersih with their 24,000 Facebook followers, creating awareness and visibility for the issue facing humanity and rights beyond an audience of the academic and UNSW. More recently, I co-wrote a chapter for a book titled "Lobbying the Autocrat: The Dynamics of Policy Advocacy in Non-Democracies", detailing how societies can actively shape and influence authoritarian states to achieve favourable policy outcomes using technologies. The book is published in 2023.