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, alternative platforms, and the tensions between visibility and authenticity in grassroots music scenes.

The second area addresses generative AI, art, and Indigeneity. Working with indigenous artists and communities across Abya Yala (South America), this collaborative research examines how generative AI tools are taken up, adapted, and sometimes resisted at the grassroots level by people whose visual cultures and worldviews are routinely misrepresented or absent from the datasets on which these tools are built. The project foregrounds indigenous agency and the principles of buen vivir (a worldview grounded in community, sustainability, and respect for all living beings) as a critical lens on both AI development and the colonial logics embedded in digital technologies. This research has been supported by the ESRC (via the Digital Good Network, University of Sheffield) and the ERC (via the University of Leeds), and has produced exhibitions at the National Botanic Gardens, Dublin (2024) and the Galería Gabriela Mistral, Santiago de Chile (2024), a forthcoming edited volume with the University of London Press, and presentations at the Association of Internet Researchers (2025) and the Society for Latin American Studies (2024).

Andreas is an active electronic musician, sound artist, and live performer whose creative practices inform and run through his academic work and research interests. Recent practice-based sound projects include: Sincronia Sonora (2019), a series of collaborative audio-visual and VR works co-created with the Ymboré indigenous community in Bahia, Brazil (supported by the British Council and the Oi Futuro Foundation); Taipa de Mão (2024), an original composition for the Sounds of Dissent symposium that drew on recordings from the Sincronia Sonora project to explore indigenous agency and self-determination through the sounds and practices of traditional building techniques; and Owenmore Flowing (2025, with Roberto DeAlmeida), a sound art piece built from sonified weather data gathered during the 2024–25 Irish storm season. These projects reflect his broader commitment to creative practice as a mode of inquiry and to the idea that the potential for grassroots culture making is everywhere, whether in an in-the-box or local music studio, a community gathering and ritual celebration, or a river catchment during storm season.

He teaches across audio production and sound design, media studies, multimedia, and research methods for academic and practice-based media projects. He has successfully supervised doctoral research on podcasting cultures in Ireland, is currently co-supervising a PhD candidate researching Sanatani rap and Hindu nationalism in India, and welcomes inquiries from prospective PhD students with interests in grassroots cultural production, digital media, and practice-based research.