Snurb's blog

The second speaker in this ANZCA 2023 is Alysson Watson, whose focus is on the journalistic ‘death knock’: the way journalists approach families who have lost someone in newsworthy circumstances. This is obviously difficult, given the circumstances; it has moved from a literal knock on the door to the use of other technologies, including now especially also social media technologies.

The next session at ANZCA 2023 is on journalism and war, and starts with Nicolette Barsdorf-Liebchen, whose interest is in how to visualise twentyfirst-century state and corporate power. Neglected from a visual perspective is that which is not seen – the invisible systems, structures, and processes of corporate-military power, and the indirect, systemic, or socially abstract invisible warfare in which we are immersed daily, and ineluctably participate on various levels.

The second full day at ANZCA 2023 started with my own keynote, on the not-so-slow demise of Twitter under Elon Musk. There was quite a substantial amount of material to work through, of course – here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Julie Browning, whose focus is on the role of campaigning media during the October 2023 referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A referendum represents an unusual campaign in that it is polarised by design (the choice is a simple Yes or No), and can cut across party lines (as it did in this case, at least to some extent).

And the next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is my colleague Samantha Vilkins, who continues our focus on the Voice to Parliament referendum by addressing especially the role of opinion polling and poll reporting in the context of the Voice referendum campaign. She begins by noting the long period of public debate about the Voice, going back at least to the election of the Albanese government in May 2022, with a much shorter formal campaign period before the referendum date of 14 October 2023.

OK, so I skipped the previous session as I got talking about current research projects with a number of colleagues I hadn’t seen for a while, but I’m back for the final session this afternoon, on the recent Voice to Parliament referendum in Australia, where my colleague Sam Vilkins and I are presenting our own papers. I’m the first presenter in the session, so here are my slides:

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Howard Lee, whose focus is on truth in Singapore’s online mediascape. He begins by highlighting the independent media outlet The Online Citizen Asia and the current affairs magazine Jom, who have had various run-ins with the Lee family who have been in control of Singaporean politics for several years.

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Carlotta Antonelli and Mauro Bomba, whose interest is in the dynamics of the political discourse around the COVID-19 pandemic in the main talkshows on Italian TV, with particular focus on the positioning of women with political roles in such discourse. In such contexts, media serve in a function as representatives of public views and responses to the issues they themselves cover.

The first session after the keynote at ANZCA 2023 is on media, truth, and democracy, and starts with John Budarick. He begins by highlighting the considerable challenges to liberal media and democracies, from a range of interconnected crises; but from a different perspective journalism is constantly in crisis as it deals with the changing environments within which it operates.

It’s a Wednesday in November and I’m in Wellington for ANZCA 2023, my final conference for this year, where I’ll also present a keynote tomorrow morning. We start today with the first of the conference keynotes, however, by Maria Bargh, who begins with the customary acknowledgments of the peoples, places, and more-than-human aspects of the lands upon which we meet – and this is also related to the theme of the conference, ka mua, ka muri, or ‘walking backwards into the future’. This refers to the way we are out of balance with each other and with the planet – in our use of resources, in our perspectives on history and politics. This is a difficult predicament that needs to be confronted – ideally through shared ownership and collaborative governance models.

Maria suggests that there are several examples that provide pointers to solutions for this. One draws on Whanaungatanga – kinships and relationships: one collective in the South Island of New Zealand have a 500-year plan for land, resources, and community, for instance, and this governs the sustainable operation of their enterprises; these provide for participating families and sustain traditional practices (in farming and other fields) as well as reconnecting people to each other and the land and forcing them to look to the future.

A second example are projects for bioremediation, addressing the industrial contamination of lands – but without removing the contaminated soil altogether and by instead using longer-term in situ remediation approaches that draw on a range of fungi and tree species that are especially efficient at removing toxins from the soil. This represents a more caring relationship with the land, combining Māori and Wwestern scientific approaches.