César Albarrán-Torres

César Albarrán-Torres is a Mexican-Australian scholar and film critic. He has been widely published in academic and non-academic titles as a film and literary critic, author and translator. His current research focuses on the intersections between digital media, finance and gambling. He also researches postcolonial identities and subjectivities in film and television, as well as the negotiations between social media and politics in Mexico, particularly concerning the drug cartels. He is the author of Digital Gambling: Theorizing Gamble-Play Media (Routledge, 2018) and Global Trafficking Networks on Film and Television: Hollywood’s Cartel Wars (Routledge, 2021). He is a research affiliate of the Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making, funded by the ARC.

He is Chief Investigator in the ARC Discovery project, "Understanding Children’s Mobile Gamble-Play Cultures: Gateways to Gambling", which aims to minimize the harms involved in children's access to gambling by developing an understanding of how Australian children use mobile phones to engage in "gamble-play". It will generate a new evidence base to inform evolving regulation around children and gambling, and to improve child and parent literacies about the ways mobile media content introduces children to gambling-like play behaviours.