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The third speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session on cultural and heritage narratives surrounding the war on Ukraine is Shalabh Chopra, who begins by highlighting the changes in global power structures; in this the newly multipolar world the Global South is not readily on the side of the west in major conflicts, and may therefore also be less sympathetic towards Ukraine in the current war.

The next speaker in this session at IAMCR 2024 is Mia Angeline, who continues the theme of the arming of Ukrainian cultural heritage from the perspective of Indonesian media. Indonesia is a rising, non-aligned power in the Global South, and has a growing influence in global fora. Its historical experiences have influenced this non-alignment, and its vibrant and diverse cultural heritages may increase its sympathy for the cultural heritage concerns of other countries.

The post-lunch session that I’m attending at IAMCR 2024 is on communication around the war in Ukraine, with a particular focus on cultural heritage; I stars with Natalya Chaban. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has presented a new challenge here: a weaponised state is threatening Ukraine’s history and culture, and heritage sites are not simply collateral damage but are being actively targetted by Russia’s unprovoked aggression. Culture itself is thus a driver of conflict.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Lihan Yan, whose focus is on tweets in the 2020 US presidential election. She uses the perspective of narrative economics as a framework for interpretation here, combined with the cascading network activation model: this indicates how frames are activated by the elite, and disseminated through news media to affect the public’s political decision-making process.

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2024 session is Yunfang Cui, addressing public debate about the ‘secret photography’ incident on the Guangzhou subway in 2023, where a middle-aged man secretly photographed young female travellers. The discussion of this incident on Weibo can be seen as an example of group polarisation.

I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:

It’s an early Monday in Christchurch, which means I must be at IAMCR 2024. I’ll present later in this session, but we begin this session with Linda Kong, whose focus is on the short-video addiction of rural Chinese elders. Young people in China are in fact worried about the substantial increase in the short video watching by elderly Chinese, and there even concerns about short-video addiction.

And the final speaker in this last session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference is Frederik Henriksen, with a paper on the transformation of the digital far right as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. From a focus on anti-immigration arguments it moved towards an anti-establishment angle; it also transformed and coordinated organisationally; and found new topics especially in anti-vaccination discourse as a widely popular topic.

The next speaker at the final P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference session is the excellent Helena Rauxloh, with a paper on radical climate protests. Just recently, for example, the Just Stop Oil protest group recently defaced the Stonehenge standing stones, and received some very negative news headlines for this action – yet many of the headlines covering these protests did not even identify what these protests were about. Such radical protests can be compared against more conventional and largely non-disruptive protests like Fridays for Future.

And the final (!) session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with the great Giada Marino, presenting today on the work of the Vera.ai research project, which seeks to develop AI tools to monitor and combat mis- and disinformation on social media. This part of that project examines digital traces on Facebook during the 2018 and 2022 Italian elections.