Academic biography

Andreas Rauh is an Assistant Professor and Programme Chair of the MSc in Emerging Media at the School of Communications. His research explores grassroots cultural production and digital technologies, focusing on the practices, motivations, and working conditions of those who create culture and media, including sound, music, visual representation and image-making with generative AI tools. 

The focus on independent grassroots cultural production highlights its capacity to articulate methods and practices as forces for creativity and the generation of meaning through cultural practices. It provides a complementary, and arguably intertwined, perspective to deepen our understanding of the creative and cultural industries, as evidenced by the overlaps in talent, ideas, and creative movements. In doing so, this work aims to explore grassroots cultural production in its own terms — as situated, responsive, and shaped by the particular needs and imaginaries of its makers and communities — examining what is distinctive about it, what it shares with its industrialised counterpart, and what both reveal about how culture is made.

His academic work spans two main areas. The first focuses on popular music and digital platforms, examining how grassroots electronic dance musicians navigate the opportunities and pressures of online distribution, promotion, and self-presentation. Drawing on cultural studies, the sociology of culture, political economy, and platform analysis, this research traces the lived experience of musicians whose work sits beneath the radar of the mainstream music industry, and asks what their practices reveal about cultural labour, creative autonomy, and the platformisation of cultural life. His PhD, completed at the University of Leeds, examined these dynamics in depth, and his subsequent publications in Popular Music and Society and Social Media + Society have extended this inquiry into questions of online self-promotion, alternati