Dyah Pitaloka is Senior Lecturer in Communications and Media Studies at Monash University Malaysia. She was a Fulbright scholar and received her PhD from the University of Oklahoma and has held academic positions at the National University of Singapore and the University of Sydney, Australia.

Dyah’s research explores issues related to social, cultural, political, and policy dynamics of emerging technology, specifically within the context of health and wellbeing, social inequalities, inclusion and exclusion, and justice in communication and media. She has worked on these topics in relation to Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam and Australia.

Dyah won a number of research grants, including the recent META AR/VR Policy Grant and research grants from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC), the Ford Foundation and Wenner-Gren Foundation. She is the Primary Investigator for a research project looking at 'Regulating Sexual Violence Against Women in Metaverse' an international collaborative research between Monash University Malaysia, Monash Indonesia and the University of Atma Jaya Jakarta. Previously, Dyah works with on a research exploring the disconnection, digital resilience, and differently abled communities during the Covid-19 Pandemic Indonesia and Vietnam. Her works have been widely published in New Media & Society, Big Data & Society, The Communication Review, Social Movement Studies, Information, Communication & Society, Health Communication and Qualitative Health Research.

Dyah is also interested in exploring the use of arts-based methods for health and social justice and has been working closely with a group of women survivors’ choir on the use of songs and choral performance in trauma healing. She has published commentaries in The Jakarta Post (Dialita Choir, A Celebration of Hope, 18 December 2017); (From Victims to Survivors: The Healing Journey of the Dialita Choir, 27 September 2016), and book chapters which will be out in 2021. Dyah is a traditional Balinese dancer and has been dancing since she was 5 years old. She uses dance to introduce issues related to gender, cross-gender performer, power and identity – another topic of research that she is also interested in.

Research supervision

Dyah supervises research projects (PhD and Masters level) in a range of areas, primarily the social, cultural, political, and policy dynamics of emerging technology, specifically within the context of health and wellbeing; and social justice. 

Current project

• Engaging older groups in co-designing inclusive and sustainable digital health technologies

• Safety in the eyes of the beholder: Alternative data governance on an electronic medical record from the marginalized community's health perspective

• Exploring WhatsApp meanings among older adults in Malaysia

• Exploring memory, nostalgia and space in grester Bandung