
Dr Ross Tapsell
Ross Tapsell is a researcher at the Australian National University’s College of Asia and the Pacific, specialising in Southeast Asian media, culture and society. He is the author of Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017) and co-editor of From Grassroots Activism to Disinformation: Social Media in Southeast Asia (ISEAS Publishing, 2020). He has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, VICE and other publications in the Southeast Asian region.
Ross has been a Visiting Fellow at Indiana University (Bloomington, US), the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris) and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore). He is also on the editorial board of the international scholarly journal Asiascape: Digital Asia (Brill).
Ross is involved in a number of Southeast Asia activities at the ANU. He is currently Director of the ANU's Malaysia Institute, a project adviser to the ANU's Philippines Institute and part of the academic networks for the Indonesia Project and the Indonesia Institute.
Research Interest
My main research interests focus on digital technologies and their relationship to media, culture and politics in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. My current research interests focuses on the changing information societies of the Southeast Asian region, and the role of disinformation and social media campaigning on the democratic process.