DMRC ICA Presenters

DMRC members and visitor presentations at ICA24 are listed below.

Please confirm dates, times, and locations within the relevant conference program before attending, given the possibility of changes.

Pre Conferences

Journalism | Tuesday June 18 | National University of Singapore

Visual Affordances & Social Justice: Theory and Methods | Wednesday June 19 | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, Z9 Block, Level 6, Room 607

ABSTRACT | February 2023 has marked two years since Russian opposition activist Alexey Navalny, known as a vocal opposition leader in Russia in the 2010s, was imprisoned. He was regularly trying to be elected but also organised the largest mass anti-establishment and anti-corruption protests in Russia, before his untimely death in February 2024. Deprived of access and coverage in the Russian mainstream media, Navalny and his associates established their own media channels, including personal YouTube channels and online media outlets such as Navalny LIVE to avoid censorship and expose the corruption and abuses of power of high-ranking officials in Russia. However, at the same time, Navalny and his colleagues cannot be labelled as ‘journalists’ in a normative sense. They were not professional journalists and had not gone through the processes of journalistic socialisation, but rather ‘tried on’ journalistic roles and investigative journalism practices to expose corrupt elites. In this sense, Navalny and his team could be called (explicit) interlopers who adopt journalistic identities and force a reconsideration of what journalists are and journalism is. In this study, we look at the case of Navalny and his team and their investigative documentaries on YouTube. We relate his practice to the journalistic concept of (explicit) interlopers, analyse how their unique and alternative journalistic project has diversified a largely monopolised and authoritarian Russian public sphere, and propose extending the notion of interlopers by differentiating between interlopers by choice , and interlopers by circumstance. With Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine, the future of such media outlets has taken on a renewed sense of urgency.

Journalism | Friday June 21, 1:30pm – 2:45pm | Room 8 (GCCEC Upper)

ABSTRACT | This panel addresses how generative AI is impacting news generation, from news gathering to production and distribution, and the subsequent impacts on the quality of information available to citizens. These stages, along with its diversity of actors, including audiences, news workers and newsrooms, are often studied independently, but are woven together. This panel aims to tackle how AI in journalism could respond to the United Nations’ call to ground AI in a human rights framework.

Part of the Global Journalism Innovation Lab project.

Humanitarianism / Activism, Communication and Social Justice | Saturday June 22, 10:30am – 11.45am | Room 8 (GCCEC Upper)

ABSTRACT | Responding to this year’s conference theme of Communication and Global Human Rights, this paper presents an empirical investigation into the themes and patterns of international humanitarian responses to the Kakhovka Dam explosion in Ukraine (2023). Based on analysis performed across three social media platforms, we propose an expanded understanding of the communicative acts and behaviours that constitute humanitarianism in the digital age. These acts manifest in various forms and include tangible relief and evacuation efforts “on the ground”, advocacy efforts, as well as curation work to amplify eyewitness testimony. We also offer methodological considerations for using transformer-based computational methods to capture heterogeneous facets of these public communicative acts. In doing so, this study contributes a unique empirical case to a growing body of literature on humanitarian activism to shine light on its increasing significance in the global geopolitical landscape.

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender & Queer | Saturday June 22, 12:00pm – 1:15pm | Arena 1B (GCCEC Ground)

ABSTRACT | Pleasure is a question of sexual justice and sexual rights and as such a critical issue for queer, trans and nonbinary people. In this paper, we delineate a queer politics of pleasure by exploring LGBTQ+ people’s uses and experiences of sextech. We move from normative regulations of sextech to counter-normative, or what Paul Preciado (2018) would call “countersexual” ways of interlinking sex and tech. Which bodies, identities, pleasures and practices do sextech assume and extend? And how can these assumptions be bent or challenged in and through sextech use by LGBTQ+ people? In this move from binary understandings of bodies and gender to more fluid and nuanced sexual and gendered dynamics and forms of technological relatedness we also make space for a discussion, not only of pleasure, but of desire. In contrast to the enhancement of pleasure by design, desire is something more unruly and unpredictive with limited space in mainstream sextech discourses.

2024 Steve Jones Internet Lecture | Saturday June 22 1:30pm – 2:45pm | Arena 2 (GCCEC Ground)

Exploring New Strategies, Methods and Technologies to Track and Counter Mis-/Disinformation | Saturday June 22, 3:00pm – 4.15pm | Central B (GCCEC Ground)

ABSTRACT | This paper focusses on a computationally-assisted analysis of the broad topics of discussion in 954 Facebook pages and groups that are most strongly implicated, and highly visible, in the sharing of links to 2314 high-profile ‘fake news’ websites, between 2016 and 2022. Our approach allows us to, first, understand what else (beyond problematic content) users share in these spaces and, second, how a specific topic of interest may play a role in driving users to share mis- and disinformation.

Journalism Studies / Political Communication | Saturday June 22, 3:00pm – 4:15pm | Room 8 (GCCEC Upper)

ABSTRACT | This study advances the debate about the institutionalization of fact checking by outlining the emergence of alternative normative values associated with the current verification practices undertaken by global fact checking organizations. Drawing on the boundaries framework and jurisdictional reflections elicited by Graves (2018), and inspired by news values theory (Galtung & Ruge, 1965; Harcup & O’Neill, 2017; Shoemaker & Reese, 2014), and subsequent social media news works discussed by Hermida (2012; 2019) and García-Perdomo and colleagues (2017), this article lays the foundation for developing a similar model of values for fact-checking. We foreground a set of 6 fact-checking values, including truthfulness based on the documents produced by these organisations, online content produced in 2021 and a body of 36 semi-structured interviews conducted across Meta-affiliated organizations.

Computational Methods | Sunday June 23, 9:00am – 10:15am | Room 6 (GCCEC Upper)

ABSTRACT | This tool demonstration will introduce our toolkit for interpretive computational text analytics to support qualitative research on large document collections. Our motivation for building this toolkit was a dissatisfaction with using existing computational text analytics approaches such as topic modelling for qualitative work. We will give a practical demonstration with the command line and web interface through case studies drawing on two ongoing projects that have been driving the development of the toolkit: 1. Studying digital placemaking practices in the Expatriates Stack Exchange online community drawing on a dataset of 49,838 questions, answers, and comments. 2. Understanding how political speeches are used to manufacture crises in education, using 869,190 speeches from the proceedings of the Australian Federal Parliament over more than 100 years. During these demonstrations we will show the key practical features of this approach including: 1. Interactive investigation of model outputs including real-time queries and display of results. 2. Handling of common problems with topic models such as stopwords and selection of the number of topics in the context of qualitative inquiry. 3. Editing and reconfiguration of computational outputs with instant feedback. 4. Support for close reading at different granularities from whole documents to relevant passages.

To be continued…? Television Studies in the Age of Platformization | Sunday June 23, 10:30am – 11:45am | Arena 1A (GCCEC Ground)

ABSTRACT | The daily ‘video diet’ for many around the world has changed considerably from when foundational research in media studies identified active audiences and family viewing dynamics. One new part of many diets is video consumed on services such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube that may be offered in a) a steady stream based on past viewing, b) tied to ‘following’ different friends, people or topics, or c) deliberately searched and selected. The range of videos and services also serve many different purposes for users. This paper reports findings from pilot research using focus groups and interviews to explore why people use these services, the gratifications they offer, and how viewers understand them relative to television and film. This project brings an audience studies approach to digital media to advance understanding about what role this video plays in the construction of culture, societal attitudes, and social belonging.

Public relations | Sunday June 23, 10:30am – 11:45am | Southport 1 (Star L3)

ABSTRACT | This study examines how ethics of care (also known as care ethics) can be applied to public communication, drawing insights from a two-staged empirical study. The first stage, which explores industry best practices from award-winning campaigns, followed by elite interviews with leading practitioners, investigates how care ethics can be infused across a wide range of practices in organisational, personal, and professional contexts. The paper examines contested connections between care ethics and Aristotelian virtue ethics, building on early work by Virginia Held and others, to develop a multi-level agency model of enacting care ethics. This infuses a range of concepts: caring-about, caring-for, self-care, habitus, and the lateral integration of care as a form of ‘caring citizenship’. In turn, it advances ethics of care as a shared practice between caregivers and care-receivers, shifting its focus from essentially within the private to the public sphere, locating public communication in this process.

Media Industries | Sunday June 23, 10:30am – 11:45am | Surfer’s Paradise 3 (Star L3)

ABSTRACT | Media and creative labour at the margins of measurement Nitin Govil (2013, 173) poses a fundamental issue for media industry studies: ‘One of the entrenched yet under examined presumptions of Media Industries Studies… is the obviousness of its object’. Govil describes how Indian film finally was formally recognised as an industry by government, in part through the development of reliable data. He notes ‘instead of taking industries as pre-given and stable formations, [we] might take up a more foundational conceptual challenge’. This is to ‘depart from understanding industry simply as a form of production and focus instead on the production of “industry” itself’ (176; cf author 2022). In his overview in the field-setting Routledge Companion to Media Industries, Paul McDonald (2022, 17) suggests ‘This proposal might be taken more broadly as a guiding principle for media industries research’. In this paper we use statistical-analytical and qualitative (survey and interview) methods to take up this challenge, addressing key limitations of official Census data in measuring media and creative labour in Australia. We ask questions that challenge assumed boundaries around labour and industry: What are the qualifications pathways into media, cultural and creative industries (MCCIs)? What are the career trajectories outside the MCCIs of those with media and creative skills? What is the scope of officially unmeasured ‘secondary’ and other employment in the MCCIs and similarly unmeasured growth of social media and platform-based creatives?

Journalism Studies / Environmental Communication | Sunday June 22, 1:30pm – 2:45pm | Stradbroke Room (Star L2)

ABSTRACT | The medialization of science is often used to describe the ways in which scientists bend towards the norms, values, practices, or “logics” of journalism. Yet, the concept of medialization is theoretically bidirectional and could also be used to understand how journalists adopt the “logics” of scientists. This study sheds light on this overlooked aspect of medialization through a qualitative analysis of 19 interviews with health and science journalists about the norms, practices, and criteria they use to select, verify, and communicate research. It presents a structured framework for analyzing the impact of medialization on journalists (rather than scientists) and demonstrates that such analyses can provide important insights into the nature and implications of journalists’ adoption of science logic—what we might call the “scientization” of journalism.

ABSTRACT | The emergence of streaming services has introduced a multiplicity of changes, raising policy and regulatory concerns in different countries. In political systems, like India with established content regulations and oversight of the state on content, the emergence of streaming in a regulatory gap presents challenges for the state to continue its protectionist grasp over content. These concerns become crucial to investigate in India, and other similar political systems as it gives insights into the way government, industry stakeholders, and content creators negotiate over content controls. The article evaluates the policy process that led to content norms for streaming in India to demonstrate the way divergences related to creative freedom, commercial benefits from streaming, and disputes over content regulations get negotiated. The article argues that while different divergences emerge, the state strives to focus on content-related disputes while formulating new content regulations, negating the considerations around creative freedom and the commercial benefits of streaming. These new regulations resemble content principles and mechanisms of implementation of legacy-era content regulations, thus carrying forward the same issues with them. This outcome leads to policy silences around the benefits of streaming services in overcoming the limitations of censorship and neglects the history of the adverse impact associated with political rhetoric around content-related disputes. Ultimately, new content norms derived from a skewed focus on content controversies ensure the paternalistic role of the state in controlling content.

Monday 24 June

Mobile Communication | Monday June 24, 9:00am – 10:15am | Surfer’s Paradise 2 (Star L3)

Media Industries | Monday June 24, 9:00am – 10:15am | Southport 3 (Star L3)

ABSTRACT | This paper examines the labour relations that characterise the nascent streaming market in the Nigerian Video Film Industry (Nollywood). Following the emergence of a number of local services providing both domestic and non-domestic audiences with access to Nollywood films, many filmmakers — upstarts and veterans alike —are leveraging opportunities with streaming platforms as a means of cultural expression and professional realisation. For these filmmakers, the choice reflects their interests in the more formalised business practices that streaming represents, especially in comparison to the more opaque and informal activities of the legacy video market, despite retaining the same precarious labour dynamics endemic to the industry. This research adopts the critical media industry studies approach and draws from semi-structured interviews with 20 direct-to-streaming Nigerian filmmakers and seven Nigerian streaming executives. It also includes analysis of trade press and other published reports about film production and labour relations in Nollywood. From the foregoing, we argue the experience of precariousness in the Nollywood streaming market is currently filtered through a sense of hope and optimism hitherto absent from Nollywood and, even more critically, serves as a shared practice within the social relations of production, aligning (for now) the interests of creative workers with management to collectively address the market’s structural deficiencies. We argue this dynamic reflects the temporally and spatially specific manifestation of digital labour in the Nigerian context.

Media Industries | Monday June 24, 9:00am – 10:15am | Southport 3 (Star L3)

ABSTRACT | In the era of streaming, transnational media industries like the Korean Wave and Nollywood have gained increased global visibility through multinational streamers such as Netflix. Global distribution is crucial for both industries, yet not all industry workers can readily access the opportunities provided by global streamers. This paper uses the concept of hope labor to explore how workers engaged in productions that are not necessarily part of the prominent global Nollywood or Korean Wave are envisioning the prospect of “going global”. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with Korean and Nigerian media professionals, this paper identifies three distinct modes of hope labor – relationship-oriented, attention-oriented, and content-oriented – that shape global aspirations. We find that there is no uniform experience of globalization, and that workers consciously strategize for self-positioning as they aim to establish and sustain relationships with global streamers. This study contributes to global media studies by incorporating hope to understand the multi-faceted nature of globalization strategies employed by Korean and Nigerian cultural producers.

Journalism Studies | Monday June 24, 10:30am – 11;45am | Coolangatta 4 (Star L3)

ABSTRACT | AI-enabled text-to-image generators, such as Midjourney and DALL-E, pose profound questions about the purpose, meaning, and value of images. This raises implications for the production, editing, and consumption of images in journalism. This study explores how photo editors or equivalent in seven countries perceive and/or use generative visual AI in their newsrooms and outlines the challenges and opportunities they see for the technology. It also identifies the extent to which these newsrooms have policies governing how generative visual AI is used or, if not, the principles that would inform their development. Participants said the potential for mis/disinformation was the primary challenge of AI-generated images, also raising concerns about labour and copyright implications, the difficulty or impossibility of detecting AI-generated images, the potential for algorithmic bias, and the potential reputational risk of using AI-generated images. Conversely, participants saw potential for using AI for illustrations and brainstorming, while a minority saw it as an opportunity to increase efficiency and cut costs.

ICA Media Industry Studies stream | Monday June 24, 12:00pm – 1:15pm | Room 4 (GCCEC Upper)

Political Communication | Monday June 24, 1:30pm | Room 9 (GCCEC Upper)

Global Communication and Social Change Division | Monday June 24, 3:00pm – 4:15pm | CCG – HALL 3 – M (GCCEC Ground)

ABSTRACT | This extended abstract combines the notions of visibility labour and cosmopolitanism to explore tactics and motivations of Japanese Twitter users engaged with the issue of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Applying an innovative mixed-method approach combining network and statistical analyses with scroll-back interviews of prominent and randomly selected users from two topical communities, this abstract argues that motivations to engage in visibility practices for the sake of distant Others often lie in users’ personal experiences with other wars and crises, or the history of persecution faced by one’s in-group, such as Japanese Americans during WWII. The study also unveils limits of such visibility practices, as for some, but not all participants, geopolitical allegiances to some extent guided their ideas about future targets of these practices

Post Conferences

Tuesday 25 June

Journalism Division PhD Colloquium | Tuesday June 25 | Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia

ABSTRACT | The overall objective of my doctoral research is to understand how mainstream Canadian news media organizations are making sense of, and responding to, automated journalism. This second study of three in my article-based dissertation will use a methodological approach called network ethnography to answer the following: What is the current state of automated journalism in mainstream Canadian news media that publish textual content online? Conceptualized as “the process of using ethnographic field methods on cases and field sites selected using social network analysis (SNA),” this approach allows for the study of “social practices in large and often elusive interorganizational networks.” A number of characteristics related to automated journalism in Canada—a decentralized ecosystem, inconsistent organizational structures, and a lack of information about which organizations are deploying automated content—make network ethnography an ideal methodological approach. ​​This mapping will then set the scene for the last of my three studies, which will investigate the specific factors that are affecting the uptake of automated journalism in Canada.

Journalism Division PhD Colloquium | Tuesday June 25 | Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia

ABSTRACT | This doctoral thesis is based on the premise that university educators have the capacity and play an essential role in equipping students with the knowledge, skills, and critical thinking abilities necessary to navigate the complexity of the media landscape and participate actively in society through digital media. The aim of this project is to understand how lecturers teach digital media literacy to their university students in relation to combating misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation. The research involves identifying a sample of approximately 30 university lecturers on Indonesia’s most populous island, Java, who have experience teaching DML to their students. Interviews, observations, and document analysis will be used as the methods of data collection. The findings may serve as a foundation for further academic discussions, research, and the development of standardised approaches to enhance Indonesian digital media literacy education.

Post-API: Social Media Data Acquisition after Twitter | Tuesday June 25 2:45pm – 3:30pm | QUT, Gardens Point campus, S Block, Level 12, OJW Room

ABSTRACT | While concerns about the ‘APIcalypse’ and its aftermath for critical, independent, public-interest research have (not unreasonably) centred on the declining accessibility of social media data, the problem extends much further than this. Another crucial field of public discourse, closely interleaved with social media activities, where affordable, reliable, and comprehensive data access is severely limited is in the field of news data: here, too, the datasets available from major providers such as Factiva or ProQuest are often incomplete, inaccessible to large-scale computational research approaches, and priced well beyond what individual research projects can afford; this is even in spite of the access arrangements for such services that are in place at many university libraries. Importantly, this also affects a central field of inquiry in social media research, which addresses the question of what news content circulates in which communities on what social media platforms. Building on a comprehensive review of available sources of news data (with a focus on Australia and Germany), this presentation outlines the current situation, and sketches out approaches to addressing and improving it.

Contrary to the status quo with social media data, where platform providers claim the right to monetise the content and activity data generated by their users, news data access is complicated by the fact that the major commercial providers are not the original publishers of news content, but have licenced such content for inclusion in their news databases. Such licences are subject to various limitations, sometimes resulting in discrepancies between the news data available from manual databases searches and programmatic access through APIs or API-like interfaces; the Factiva API, for instance, provides fewer news sources than the manual Factiva search function. Licence restrictions are also likely to determine the limited exportability of news content at scale from such sources, or the often exorbitant pricing of API access. Factiva charges upwards of US$25,000 per annum for API-based data access and export, for instance, while ProQuest offers a ‘clean-room’ solution that enables researchers to undertake computational analysis on an in-house hosted Jupyter Notebook without large-scale data export capabilities for US$10,000 per annum.

As in the social media space, an increasingly popular alternative to such expensive but limited commercial solutions is content scraping directly from news Websites. Intermediary scraping services like NewsDataIO offer such news data at a comparatively lower price of around US$5000 per annum. They largely gather their data by following RSS feeds and scraping the news content that such feeds point to; this relies on the availability of such feeds as well as the absence of paywall and other access restrictions on the news site, and (like all scraping) may also be questionable under applicable copyright legislation. Additionally or alternatively, research projects could also develop their own scrapers, but similar challenges and limitations apply to such in-house approaches. Scrapers will fail if news sites change their page design, and therefore require constant maintenance. Only a small number of news outlets (including The Guardian) offer their own public APIs that provide programmatic access to their news content.

To arrive at a sufficiently comprehensive collection of news data that covers a representative subset of the news media landscape in a given country, a combination of these various sources is likely to be required. This paper outlines our emerging approach to developing this hybrid news data pipeline, and reflects on what further steps need to be taken – individually and collectively – to make our post-API approach to capturing and analysing news content at scale sustainable.

Wednesday 26 June

P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation | Wednesday June 26, 10:00am – 11:30am | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, E Block, Level 5, Room 550

ABSTRACT | While digital and social media platforms promise to bridge divides by connecting diverse individuals, they increasingly host polarised debates that threaten societal cohesion. Although conflict is an essential component of societal integration (Dubiel, 1992; Mouffe, 1993), there is a growing concern over the degree of polarisation evident in public communication today (e.g., Baum & Groeling, 2008; Kreiss & McGregor, 2023), especially on social media platforms (Kubin & von Sikorski, 2021). While the digital turn in communication research offers novel opportunities to study political polarisation through traceable interactions at scale, it also adds complexity to an already challenging concept. Ambiguities surrounding the conceptual understanding of polarisation in different fields lead to problems in advancing the research in the digital communication context. The conflation of different types and forms of polarisation (issue-based, ideological, affective, interpretive, interactional, …) erodes the utility of the concept itself and opens the door to an uncritical proliferation of technologically determinist perspectives and solutions.

In this paper, we conceptualise destructive polarisation and its observable symptoms through the lens of digital media and communication. To avoid future indiscriminate use of the term polarisation, we advocate for precise delineations when studying polarisation as a threat to democracy and public communication (see also e.g., McCoy et al., 2018; Somer, 2001). The focus here is not on polarisation in general, but rather on determining how and when it becomes destructive. We have identified five key symptoms of this transition – breakdown of communication, discrediting and dismissing of information, erasure of complexities, exacerbated attention and space for extreme voices, and exclusion through emotions – though not all five need to be present for polarisation to have reached a destructive state.

Destructive polarisation is thus the result of various dynamics of simplification, amplification, and exclusion, and results in the alignment of individuals and groups with overly simplistic categories (e.g., liberal/conservative; left/right), an unwillingness to acknowledge the legitimacy of opposing perspectives, and a refusal to engage in meaningful communication across, or even on a meta-level about, these divisive lines. However, none of these symptoms in isolation necessarily point to the existence of destructive polarisation: it is perfectly legitimate, for instance, to refuse to engage with violent extremists. The destructive force of polarisation emerges not from an ‘Us vs Them’ dichotomy per se, but from how these strategies are deployed in combination as rigid battle lines in the political landscape, thereby neglecting the nuanced attention actual societal issues warrant.

This escalating scenario is becoming a focal concern, as it undermines democratic principles and practices. We apply and discuss the concept of destructive political polarisation with regard to studying its dynamics on selected recent issues discussed within digital media and communication contexts. By identifying observable indicators within communication practices, we develop an analytical toolkit, thereby advancing our understanding of destructive polarised discourse.

P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation | Wednesday June 26, 12:00pm – 1:30pm | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, E Block, Level 5, Room 550

ABSTRACT | Populism and polarisation as terms of social commentary have had similar recent trajectories, used more frequently in reference to growing concerns about political movements and activity worldwide, though specific definitions of both differ through porous, nebulous borders between social sciences and public commentary / journalism. Our previous research has systematically reviewed the many myriad ambiguous and splintered uses of ‘polarisation’ as a term in media and communication studies, building off these observations to define elements of specifically destructive polarisation.

But populism as a concept remains far more monolithically defined and operationalised in research than polarisation. Populism is defined in terms of ideology – thin-centred, and focused on people vs. elite, or anti-elitist, ideology (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2018). This gives populism a certain elasticity, where ‘people’ can be claimed by any actor who can make this rhetorical claim vs. any group they deem ‘elite’. At the same time, the label populism is also one often assigned to political movement which the interpellator considers illegitimate or dangerous. The presence of a charismatic leader, the populist leader or the demagogue, is another consideration, though this is less commonly seen in the literature than thin-centred and anti-elitist as core definitions. On the other hand, research also identifies issue-based populism, such as relating to COVID-19 or climate change, where the people vs. elite construction is utilised to a specific issue end. This is perhaps most strongly seen in the ways in which right-wing parties use immigration as a wedge issue.

Therefore, we extend our previous research of defining destructive polarisation, here presenting the results of a literature review of current populism research which holds relevance for research on polarisation and partisanship. We present the findings of a two-stage review process, which firstly collated insights from existing landscape and review papers across the broader research on populism (74 texts), noting the disciplinary, geographical, ideological and methodological clusters (Hunger & Paxton, 2021). We then analyse a longlist of texts quantitatively and a shortlist quantitatively; the first consisting of 922 texts containing “populis*” and either “polari* or partisan* in their titles, abstracts or keywords, and the second of the most highly-cited texts across focused sub-searches of topic keywords such as affect and rhetoric.

Our review further opens the conceptualisation of polarisation as something beyond the more commonly understood left/right partisan constructions into the people/elite constructions of any underlying ideology of populism, such as that of ‘people’ vs. ‘elite corporations’ or ‘people’ vs. ‘elite media’.

P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation | Wednesday June 26, 4:15pm – 5:45pm | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, E Block, Level 5, Room 557

ABSTRACT | Among the issues facing democracies today, polarisation and populism have been increasingly highlighted as challenges or things to fear (Lafont, 2019; Arora et al., 2022). Although not the same, both issues rely on the construction of oppositions (Rovira Kaltwasser, 2014); that is, an Us versus a Them. Moreover, despite the widespread use of both terms, there is no consensus over their definition or what they entail. As a concept, populism is highly contested (Collier, 2001), sometimes deemed as “conceptually vague” (Stengel, 2019), or an “empty signifier” (Laclau, 2005). Diverse kinds of populism have been recognised through the study of different realities; populism can be inclusionary, exclusionary, or both; right- or left-wing (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2013). Similarly, polarisation has been considered an “empty” adjective (Farjam et al., 2024) or, at least, conceptually imprecise enough to allow the disorganised proliferation of types of polarisation (e.g., issue-based, social, and affective polarisation), and its over recognition (Esau et al., 2023). Kreiss and McGregor (2023) argue that extant literature on polarisation equates it with conflict. Portraying conflict as an exclusively harmful phenomenon, though, can dismiss its potential relevance for positive change in democratic processes (e.g. to fight inequality). Recent efforts have started broadening definitions of polarisation and populism based on acknowledging that certain types of conflict can contribute to and strengthen democracy (Le Bas, 2018). The discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1983), and later developments by Mouffe (1993; 2013), consider conflict and confrontation—discursive struggles—as fundamental aspects of all meaning-making in general, and democratic process in particular. For Mouffe, any signification practice and identity formation are inherently antagonistic. However, she distinguishes between two types of antagonisms. In one form, theantagonism emerges as a confrontation between two sides—enemies—attempting to eliminate or exclude the other. Another form, though, appears when the antagonists acknowledge the ineradicability of their differences, but they consider each other as adversaries or rivals, rather than enemies. This is what Mouffe refers to as agonism. After all, the establishment of frontiers between Us and Them – although porous and overlapping – is indispensable for culture (Lotman, 2019). But especially because the way in which those identities are perceived guides how individuals interact. Taking Mouffe’s formulation of agonism as a starting point, in this paper, we ask whether one can envisage different conditions, dynamics, or forms of antagonisms that can lead to an agonistic formation. We answer this through a critical dialogue between Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism and Landowski’s (2007; 2009; 2015) social semiotics, in which he theorises four modes of management of Otherness: assimilation, admission, segregation, and exclusion. These modes point to different degrees of openness or closure, the potential role of reason and affect, and to a strategic dimension to comprehend the ways in which an Us can handle its own identity when dealing with the presence and/or interactions with Them. Our main contribution is to bridge the works of Mouffe and Landowski to provide conceptual tools to improve current understandings of populist and polarised discourses, practices, and/or interactions, and how they are operationalised.

P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation | Wednesday June 26, 4:15pm – 5:45pm | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, E Block, Level 5, Room 557

ABSTRACT | Accusing an opponent of impropriety is hardly a new feature of the political landscape. However, in recent years we have seen both the number of such accusations, and their intensity, increase dramatically. This paper takes a much closer look at this political tactic (using the term “disinformative attack”), and aims to understand them in two separate (but connected) ways. First, it considers how they work at a strategic level. We argue that disinformative attacks gain traction with both the media and the public due to their often ‘sensational’ nature, and journalism’s inherent bias towards covering any claim made by prominent political figures (see Tsifati, 2020). This analysis is part of a broader project which aims to better understand the increasingly sophisticated tactics deployed by political communications professionals to attract and/or manage public attention.

The second part of our analysis considers how disinformative attacks contribute to the broader issue of political polarisation. We do so by drawing on the concept – from religious studies – of ‘reactive co-radicalization’, first introduced by Pratt (2014) to explain how extreme forms of Islam, and Islamophobia react against imagined versions of the other in a mutually-reinforcing process. We argue, therefore, that disinformative attacks (and, indeed, disinformation more broadly) can act as a driver of polarisation because political groups are often given (usually through hyper-partisan media), a fictionalised version of a ‘radical’ political opponent. This then provides a rationale for those people to themselves adopt more extreme (e.g. violent, anti-democratic) postures.

For our analysis, we draw on two key examples. The first is the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021. We suggest that this event may have been dramatically exacerbated by a number of narratives that were widely adopted in conservative media (e.g. Fox News, OAN), and by conservative political figures, through the summer of 2020 about BLM protests (following the murder of George Floyd), and later that same year about supposed Democratic interference in the 2020 presidential election. The second – and ongoing – example is how Donald Trump has responded to four separate criminal indictments in 2023. The ex-President has claims that, if re-elected, it would be reasonable to have the Justice Department investigate Joe Biden (without cause) because the same had (supposedly) been done to him (see Samuels, 2023).

Thursday 27 June

P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation | Thursday June 27, 10:00am – 11:00am | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, E Block, Level 5, Room 550

ABSTRACT | The significance of building cultural competence and the need for respectful, culturally appropriate engagement with Indigenous people is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Australian tertiary educational institutions during the last decade, there has been an outward commitment to developing cultural competence. Many academic, industry, government and cultural institutions now acknowledge the role of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history and ongoing contribution. However, while we state our acknowledgement of the lands on which we teach and work and recognise that these lands have been places of learning, research and engagement, how are educators and researchers, providing transformative teaching and learning opportunities relevant to our communities amidst ever-increasing polarisation reflected on digital media platforms?

In 2023, we had an opportunity to rapidly develop a significant assessment for a 3rd-year undergraduate media communications unit that coincided with a pivotal event in Australia’s body politic and structural changes in Twitter’s research ecosystem. This study discusses the approach, methods and outcomes of a semester-long undergraduate unit titled Social Media Analytics taught during Australia’s intense political and social debate on the 2023 Voice Referendum. The historic referendum sought to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia’s Constitution and, in doing so, establish an elected, representative body enshrined in the Australian Constitution. Given that Twitter was not a popular social media destination for Gen Z (people born between 1997 to 2012) and the implosion of tools using the Twitter Academic API, it was an easy decision to move to an alternative object of study.

Lectures and readings focused on the foundational work by Burgess & Green (2018) on YouTube and its participatory online video mechanics and culture, and the role of publishers who promote misinformation and divisive content in a contentious, factious and polarised social media landscape (Bruns, Vilkins & Choucair, 2023). This study analyses the contemporary discussion of a once-in-a-generation political and social event and reflects on the:

• Unexpected insights that students surfaced;
• How they used open-source and industry standard tools to demonstrate insights; and
• Why it is essential to engage with real-world learning experiences in an increasingly fractious digital media landscape.

While a spectrum of right and left-leaning ideologies was recognised, students overwhelmingly found the political sentiment supporting the “No” campaign expressed by Sky News Australia, owned by conservative Rupert Murdoch, and Senator Pauline Hanson’s ‘Please explain’ channel, showing strong engagement. Agenda-setting theory and how media aims to influence public focus using social media platforms (Feezell, 2018; Bruns & Highfield, 2016) was cited, and how some publishers benefited from YouTube’s open platform and algorithm of incentivising highly engaging videos (Munger & Phillips, 2020). Ultimately, how students engage with an increasingly polarised digital media landscape may offer insights for researchers and educators seeking to integrate and build cultural and technical competencies and take the next step in understanding the techniques used to polarise communities.

P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation | Thursday June 27, 1:30pm – 3:00pm | QUT, Kelvin Grove campus, E Block, Level 5, Room 557

ABSTRACT | The way political leaders communicate is a key factor to understand and evaluate political polarisation. By addressing the political landscape as an “us versus them” fight, political public figures are able, through their discourses, to inflame the civil society and drive political tension to dangerous levels. But for some decades discourses have not been the primary locus of investigation in polarisation studies, as it has long been measured by self-reported attitudes, perceptions, and ideologies. These established quantitative methods facilitate comparisons across different contexts and time periods. Studies on polarising rhetoric (King & Anderson, 1971; Scott, 1981) and the recent focus on political debates in digital platforms, has contributed to develop ways to investigate the communicative and linguistic dimension of polarisation. But only recently have methods to measure it on large scale begun to be developed, with computational linguistic analyses for instance gaining attention only in the last decade (Németh, 2022). Our study introduces a new approach to measure political polarisation by combining manual and computational methods, focusing on the rhetoric of leaders and how political scenarios are described in their discourses, highlighting the importance of how differences between sides or groups are interpreted (Somer & McCoy, 2019).

Polarising rhetoric fundamentally constructs an “us against them” narrative, dividing the political landscape into two opposing groups. The severity of this dichotomy varies, influenced by the political actors’ alignment or disassociation with other groups, actors, and institutions. At one extreme, political discourse may idolize a group, suggesting deep loyalty and unity. At the other, it may employ aggressive language to vilify the opposing group, indicating irreconcilable differences and framing them as a threat to one’s values and way of life. To measure the polarising discourses in a nuanced and still standardized way, in our research, we adopt a multi-step methodology with quantitative and qualitative parts. We use the case of eight political leaders’ discourses during election campaigns across four distinct nations: Peru, Brazil, Australia, and Denmark.

Our methodology begins with systematically collecting posts from leading political figures in selected countries during their election campaigns, including the image texts and transcription of videos. Using natural language processing tools, we then identify and extract entities mentioned in the dataset, applying language models for English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Danish to accommodate our study’s linguistic diversity. A meticulous manual review follows to refine the entities. Next, the classification stage involves categorizing these entities based on their portrayal in each political leaders’ discourse, ranging from strong affiliation (“in-group”) to strong opposition (“out-group”). This process starts with manual categorization, then uses Large Language Models to scale up. Our classification system, outlined in our codebook, details criteria for assigning entities to seven distinct levels of affiliation or opposition. Our approach focusing on the discursive constructions of “in-groups” and “out-groups” provides a standardized measure for comparing discourses across languages and includes content from texts, images, and videos, thereby offering a comprehensive framework for measuring political polarisation in the discourse level.