N. (Nataliia) Laba, Dr

Nataliia (she/her) is an early career researcher of visual generative media at the Department of Communication and Information Studies.

She graduated with a PhD in media studies from the University of New South Wales (UNSW Sydney), in 2023. Her thesis titled Organizational identity design: A multimodal discourse analysis of Australian university homepages addressed websites as a medium for organizational identity communication, offering an account of the technological and design features through which top-tier Australian universities engage social actors of higher education.

Nataliia's current research is on visual generative media / text-to-image generators. Focusing on the interplay between machine originality and repetition, she looks into asymmetrical power dynamics in human-model interaction in relation to the distribution of human-machine agency and the extent to which generative models can be seen as facilitators or arbiters of originality. In this work, she combines interdisplinary insights from discourse-analytic approaches to communication, media studies, and computer science.

Nataliia has eight years of teaching experience in digital and social media, systemic functional linguistics, and organizational communication, across Hong Kong, Australia, and the Netherlands.

She also supports early career researchers and doctoral students in the role of a Representative for the Visual Communication Studies Division at the International Communication Association.