Claire Konkes

Claire Konkes is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at the University of Tasmania. Her PhD focused on news media coverage of how a high-profile crime contributed to reforming Tasmania’s age of consent laws. Her research continues to explore news media’s contribution to public debate, especially in environmental and criminal matters. She investigates the ways in which news and other media contribute to sense-making and problem-solving. She is an affiliated researcher with the Institute for the Study of Social Change (ISC) at the University of Tasmania and some of her recent projects have looked at media representations of environmental public interest litigation and Australian environmental policy.

Fiercely curious about how we communicate and debate complex and difficult subjects, Claire worked as an environmental campaigner and journalist before joining the University of Tasmania. She worked on some of the early climate change campaigns in the 1990s before joining the newsroom at The Australian newspaper in 1999 as a reporter. Her recent journalism has appeared in a more recently in The Monthly magazine.