A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable on "Margins in Motion: Platformization, Polarization, and the New Public Sphere", as part of the CORIT: Countering Online Radicalization and Incivility in Italy research project at the University of Urbino, led by the great Giovanni Boccia Artieri.

The full recording of the roundtable — which also involved Katarina Bader, Raquel Recuero, Eugenia Siapera, and Augusto Valeriani — should soon be available online (and I'll add the link to the video then), but I thought I'd also share the text of my opening statement here …

2025 is finally over, but other than as part of the liveblogs I haven't yet had a chance to round up our various presentations at conferences during the second half of the past year. We ended the year with the AANZCA conference on the Sunshine Coast, where I presented what was something of a labour of love: a look back on ten turbulent years of the #auspol hashtag on what used to be Twitter. 

Through the efforts of a series of excellent data scientists in our QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) team (especially Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, Jane Tan …

After my stops in Brussels, Aarhus, Hamburg, and Bergen I'm now on the Brazilian leg of this conference journey, having already visited Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre for satellite symposia before the AoIR 2025 conference proper begins tomorrow. Here are some updates from those events, and slides for my presentations.

In Belo Horizonte I presented a keynote at the colloquium “Perspectives on Public Spheres and the Network of Publics”, outlining my current thinking on what has replaced 'the' public sphere; the slides are here:

Axel Bruns. “From 'the' Public Sphere to a Network of …