Tama Leaver

Tama Leaver is a Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia and expert media commentator. He is a past President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), having served on the AoIR Executive Committee from 2019 to 2025, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child.

His research interests include digital childhood, focusing on datafication and the impact of generative AI on children; infancy online; visual social media; digital death; mobile gaming; and the changing landscape of media distribution.

He is the author of Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology and Bodies (Routledge, 2012); co-editor of An Education in Facebook? Higher Education and the World’s Largest Social Network (Routledge, 2014) with Mike Kent; and Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscape (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) with Michele Willson; co-author of Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures (Polity, 2020) with Tim Highfield and Crystal Abidin; co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Digital Media and Children (Routledge, 2021) with Lelia Green, Donell Holloway, Kylie Stevenson and Leslie Haddon; and co-editor of Gaming Disability: Disability Perspectives on Contemporary Video Games (Routledge 2023) with Katie Ellis and Mike Kent.

He has been awarded teaching awards from the University of Western Australia, Curtin University, and in 2012 received a national Australian Award for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities and the Arts.