15th September 2022
QUT team wins outstanding journal article award in the field of communication and ageing
The National Communication Association’s Communication and Ageing Division on Thursday announced that a QUT team had won its Communication and Ageing Outstanding Journal Article Award, which seeks to recognise ‘an outstanding article that has made a significant contribution to the field of communication and ageing’.
The team, consisting of Dr TJ Thomson (Senior Lecturer, School of Communication); Prof Evonne Miller (Director, Design Lab); Prof Sarah Holland-Batt (School of Creative Practice); A/Prof Jen Seevinck (School of Design); and Mr Sam Regi (Design Lab), is being honoured for an article, ‘Visibility and invisibility in the aged care sector: Visual representation in Australian news from 2018-2021’ published in Media International Australia.
This study adopts a visual focus by examining all the images accompanying news articles related to aged care over a nearly three-year period. It makes three contributions to the communication and ageing literature.
First, the visual approach itself is novel compared to the bulk of scholarship that examines written or spoken expression. Second is the interdisciplinary nature of this research that blends gerontological expertise with an intimate understanding of news production, editing, and gatekeeping forces that lead to a nuanced analysis of the visual news values journalists drew on or ignored in their coverage. Third is how the article extends the scholarly understanding of symbolic annihilation and how it operates visually in relation to ageing.
The article stems from a broader programme of work undertaken through an Australian Research Council-funded Discovery Project: Amplifying Voices from the Royal Commission into Aged Care.
The QUT team has been invited to the National Communication Association’s 108th annual convention from 17-20 November, 2022 where the team’s work will be formally recognised.