[2] In his speech to the National Press Club (Australia) on 3 September 2008, the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Senator the Hon Kim Carr announced that Professor Turner, had been appointed to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC).
His over-arching research interests include Australian film and media, issues in Australian nationalism, popular culture, celebrity, talkback radio, audience studies, and the role of television in a post-broadcast era increasingly dominated by new media formats such as the Internet.
In 2015, the journal Cultural Studies published a special issue "commemorating and evaluating the contribution of Graeme Turner to the field".
Edited by Gerard Goggin, Anna Pertierra and Mark Andrejevic,[4] this issue included contributions by Meaghan Morris, Toby Miller, Frances Bonner, Tony Bennett, John Byron, and Melissa Gregg.
Turner was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) in the 2019 Queen's Birthday Honours for "distinguished service to higher education through pioneering work in the field of cultural studies and the humanities".