Mr. Tito Ambyo
Details
College: School of Media & Communication
Department: School - Media & Communication
Campus: City Campus Australia
arsisto.ambyo@rmit.edu.au
ORCID: 0000-0003-3135-1869
LinkedIn
Open to
- Collaborative projects
- Masters Research or PhD student supervision
- Media enquiries
- Join a web conference as a panellist or speaker
- Industry Projects
- Career advice
About
Tito Ambyo is a media anthropologist and journalist working across the intersections of ecology, spirituality, care ethics, identity and media in Indonesia and Australia. His theoretical thinking is shaped by anthropology, journalism, decoloniality and Science and Technology Studies.
He is currently a lecturer in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University. In 2026, he has been selected as a research fellow with KITLV/Leiden University, researching colonialism, haunted ecologies and extinct animals, specifically looking at Javan tiger.
Before academia, Tito was a political journalist. He now still produces and works in journalism and publishes stories on food politics and food security. As a lecturer, he teaches photojournalism, data journalism, multimedia journalism, and research skills for Honours students.
Tito is a board member of the Melbourne Press Club and Inside Indonesia magazine and is a co-founder of the Nongkrong Collective, which runs highly successful food/arts/music events, some of which are based on his research, that have been attended by more than ten thousand people. He is also a member of the History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective at the University of Melbourne and RMIT's Digital Ethnography Research Centre and non/fiction Lab.
He is open to connecting and working with anyone researching Indonesian media, the more-than-human world, or working to build a more just world through media, anthropology and journalism.
Research fields
- 440107 Social and cultural anthropology
- 4701 Communication and media studies
- 449901 Studies of Asian society
- 470105 Journalism studies
UN sustainable development goals
- 10 Reduced Inequalities
- 11 Sustainable Cities and Communities
- 13 Climate Action
- 16 Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions
- 4 Quality Education
Teaching interests
As a journalist who started his writing and reporting career when he was sixteen in Indonesia, Tito has worked across print, broadcast and digital media publications and he uses this experience to inform the way he teaches.
He teaches multimedia, digital and data journalism as well as photojournalism.
He also teaches a research lab for Honours students, where he guides the students to develop ideas and projects based on storytelling practices.
Research interests
Tito Ambyo's research focuses on haunting, ecology, memory and media in Southeast Asia and Australia. He is currently doing a research project about the haunting of extinct animals, taking the Javan tiger as his central case. Though officially extinct, the tiger is never absent: it survives in Indonesian cosmology as siluman, spirit-tigers and were-tigers moving between worlds, and in colonial archives and museums. It persists too in Indonesian popular culture — in films, on social media, in monuments, even as a football club mascot — and in its ecological absence, through a landscape still reorganising itself around the loss of its apex predator. The project argues that colonialism produced a double extinction: the biological destruction of the tiger, and the delegitimisation of the Indonesian knowledge systems through which people relate to animals. The research continues his earlier work on how colonial violence creates ghosts that live on and change through media practices and platforms, and it will form part of a broader book proposal on human relationships with extinct and endangered animals through anthropology.
Another area of interest for him is the relationship between media technology and culture. His PhD 'Digital Hantulogi' looks at how Indonesian horror content producers on YouTube are creating their own hauntology through engaging with the digital platform as well as with local, national and international spiritual ideas to create new ideas on haunting. With his RMIT colleague Janak Rogers, he has won a grant for his research on Artificial Intelligence for a project called The Empty Chair Protocol, which looks at the structure of missingness and absence in AI tools and what it means for journalism students and professional journalists. He is also interested in how journalists create cultures and infrastructures of knowledge, including how a newsroom is not just a physical structure but a metaphysical one that can create barriers to creating good journalism in the world today.
Tito is an experienced journalist and producer, and has recently produced a series of audio interviews on open ethnography with Jaringan Etnografi Terbuka (Open Ethnography Network) and a podcast on migrants and entrepreneurship in Melbourne, funded by the City of Melbourne, called 'Making it in Melbourne'.
Tito is also a co-founder of Nongkrong, an Indonesian-Australian collective that runs Indonesian food, arts and music events exploring questions of Indonesian diaspora identities in Australia that are based on research and conversations done with other Indonesian diaspora communities.
He is also interested in fantasy and is currently writing a novel based on his research on Southeast Asian mythologies, ghosts and monsters.
