Snurb's blog

The next speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Ana Sofia Cardinal, and her interest is in (news) partisan sorting. This builds on digital trace data from the Web browsing practices of Internet users in several European countries and the US. This work is important given the suspected increase in political polarisation, the decrease in trust in the media, and the rise of far-right parties in several countries.

The next speaker in this opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Richard Fletcher, whose focus is in polarisation amongst news audiences. Has such polarisation increased over time, and how does it differ between news audiences in different countries?

It’s a lovely Thursday in spring in Bologna, and I’m here at the renaissance Palazzo Ercolani for the opening of the concluding symposium of the I-POLHYS project on polarisation in hybrid systems. We start with Sergio Splendore and, whose focus is on journalists’s perceptions of polarisation.

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Caryn Coatney, whose focus is on the data journalism of the ABC’s Digital Story Innovation team. Data journalism has evolved considerably over the past years, with the initial focus on data visualisation giving way to a broader role that in some news organisations also includes the maximising of news content engagement metrics through clickbait.

The next speaker at ANZCA 2023 is Sky Marsen, whose interest is in health communication during crisis. This involves matters of personal and social identity and high levels of scientific uncertainty that motivate many to look to opposing discourses from religious and other sources. The present project explored culturally diverse contexts in developing nations, and focusses here on a case study of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16.

The final session at ANZCA 2023 that I’m attending starts with Alex Beattie, whose interest is in news avoidance in Aotearoa. This usually refers to intentional news avoidance, but it is not always clear just how intentional such avoidance is; broader media platform choices might also have an impact on whether and how people see the news, for instance.

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Kirsty O’Callaghan, whose interest is in the role of gender in effective climate change communication. The important role of women at the heart of climate action has long been recognised, but climate change communication must also be multi-dimensional and involve a diversity of voices – Greta Thunberg’s success in her climate advocacy demonstrates this.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

And the final paper in this ANZCA 2023 session is by Petra Theunissen, whose focus is on the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ movement in Aotearoa and Australia. This is a non-prosocial activist movement, which believes in the illegitimacy of government institutions and sees itself as subject to laws only as they interpret and consent to them. This morphed from a far-right, white supremacist posse comitatus into a broader movement that now overlaps (but is not the same as) other movements including anti-vaxxers, conspiracists, and other groups.