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The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my great QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting progress findings from a large literature review on populism. We have previously observed how poorly defined the concept of polarisation is in the literature; there are many forms of polarisation that scholars have identified, but hardly and overarching perspectives.

This project took a similar approach to the concept of populism, which turns out to be better defined; dominant in this is Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin ideology that highlights divisions between ‘us’ …

The second speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Yuefeng Qu, whose interest is in the growth of far-right populism on Xitter. She is exploring this especially in the context of the French far-right party Rassemblement National. RN has now emerged as a major force in French politics, with typically nationalist and exclusionary views.

This might be understood as a kind of populism 2.0, which bypasses conventional media, draws on viral rhetoric, and positions political leaders as personal brands and political influencers. It also capitalises on mainstream media tendencies to favour game frames over issue …

For the last session on this opening day of the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore I’m at a session on populism and propaganda, and we start with Karl Mendoza. He highlights the importance of trust, and the way that trust can fracture at times of scandal. When trust breaks down in a democracy, what exactly is if that people stop believing in – democracy itself, the system, its actors?

Scandals are often seen as breaches of ethics or governance, but they also activate competing moral grammars: in deeply divided democracies, trust does not simply divide – it polarises. Trust is …

The final paper in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is by Zhangyan Li, Xinrui Wang, and Xingye Yao. Their focus is on reactive environmentalism in China. China has faced several recent environmental challenges, and documentaries have tried to call attention to these issues, but were sometimes banned by the government for ‘defaming China’; this indicates a tension between such discussions of environmental challenges and the state promotion of robust Chinese nationalism.

Environmental nationalism is a concept that seeks to address this, and to shift public debate especially on social media platforms in China. Nationalism can take …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Dhyan Singh; his interest is in the use of documentary films to create environmental awareness amongst students in India. Climate change is a severe global challenge, of course, and especially also for vulnerable countries like India; India also has the world’s largest youth population, and addressing this group is therefore also key to addressing climate change itself. Documentary films can play an important role here.

How do such films impact on students’ emotions and encourage them to take action, then? This study worked with 63 students …

The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Tanmay Samanta, whose focus is on digital greenwashing. Social media, and especially influencers on social media platforms, are critical to promoting sustainable consumerism; influencer marketing is also a key element of greenwashing, however.

Their style of storytelling is central to their success, and considerable effort goes into this. Greenwashing, in particular, purposefully creates false, favourable opinions about a product, service, or company’s efforts to be environmentally friendly. Tanmay explored this especially for social media influencers in India, examining their influence, their use of sustainability or greenwashing …

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.

I’m presenting our work on applying the practice mapping approach to Facebook debates on climate change in Australia in this next session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, but we begin with Stephan Görland – his interest is in the role of narratives, actors, and power in debates about the energy transition. The energy sector is the largest human-made infrastructure sector in history, and fossil fuels and energy-intensive products remain the most traded goods globally.

Communication fundamentally shapes how people understand, accept, and engage with energy, and energy communication can therefore be seen as an object of study in …

And the final speaker in this early session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is Jaime Riccio, whose focus is on digital identities and the techno-self from a critical cultural perspective. Very early theories about communication built on the Shannon-Weaver model of encoding and decoding, while early cyborg theories built on Norbert Wiener’s emphasis on feedback loops; but this also raises the question of power – it enables the development of a technocracy.

Ordinary populations might feel oppressed by these developments; technopolitical developments create the potential for a panopticon that is driven by big tech and biopolitics. Cyborgs embody …

The next speakers in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore are Jiawei Dai and Mengyao Liu, whose interest is in human perceptions of AI. These are often shaped in a socialised manner: different cognitive frameworks will affect how people perceive AI, and what relationships they form with AI technologies. Heuristic processing provides one explanation for this: this focusses on easily noticeable and understandable cues.

Users might perceive AI chatbots as human-like, and engage with them accordingly; in fact, there are lower social expectations about how AIs might react to human users, and humans might therefore engage in …