This page details research partnerships involving the NAPWHA Learning initiative (most recent listed first). You can find out more about what each project involved, and access relevant outputs such as reports, guides and journal articles.
Not Safe for Health (2025-26)
The Not Safe for Health project was a research partnership with Prof Kath Albury, Mx Daniel Reeders from NAPWHA, and a team of Swinburne University academics that included A/Prof Cesár Albarran-Torres, Dr Julia Tomasetti, Dr Joshua Finn, Dr Kyle Moore, Shubha Kayastha, and Xiaofei Yang. It explored the ways in which digital platforms and social media are increasingly unsafe for health promotion and community building. This includes the persistent misrecognition of our work as sexually inappropriate or politically controversial, and hostile moderation practices that permit hate speech towards our communities and enable organised campaigns reporting our content.
The study was enabled by a seed grant from Swinburne and part funded by an ARC grant #AAAAAA awarded to Prof Albury. It involved substantial ‘para-ethnography’ consulting with experienced health promotion and communications and engagement practitioners at NAPWHA member organisations. This approach treats ethnographic informants as experts in their field of practice and seeks to collaborate with them to articulate their understanding of the problems, how they are caused, and how they can be managed or avoided. The result is a pair of deeply researched, highly practical guides to the legal and policy issues and the media and communication strategy issues posed by the Not Safe for Health problem.
Project activities
- Not Safe for Health launch webinar (Tues 15 July 11AM-12.30AM AEST on Zoom)
Outputs
- #1—Not Safe for Health? A guide to digital harm reduction. (Coming 15 July!)
- #2—Not Safe for Health? Legal and policy brief. (Coming 15 July!)
- Journal article for Communications Research and Practice (under review).
Impacts
- Submission to the Meta Oversight Board (____)
- Submission to the Digital Industry Group (DIGI) (____)
- Citation in the ADMS report on a Digital Duty of Care (____)