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It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig. His work is usually on mis- and disinformation, and he is interested in the underlying conditions of the digital knowledge society which supported the emergence of such information (dis)orders. His key concept here is the idea of counter-knowledge orders, with particular focus on the far right.

In contemporary society, falsehood is identified as a ‘disorder’ …

The final presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Florian Primig, whose interest is in how we make sense of misinformation. He participated in an expert citizen council in Germany that explored the question of misinformation, which sparked him to rethink these concepts – we ought to try some critical introspection and consider the societal factors that have challenged the established knowledge order and enabled the emergence of counter-knowledge orders.

That emergence is not necessarily a bad thing; the primacy of knowledge has always been problematic. Instead of citizens we are now seen as life-long learners, and this requires us …

Up next at the ICA 2024 conference is Svetlana Bodrunova. Her study emerged from a research project that sought to examine the transnational communication by migrants from the same countries of origin, which found global cooperation between female Russian-speaking bloggers with migration backgrounds during the COVID-19 pandemic, about global issues and agendas; these might be understood as transnational publics.

What theories can we use to explain such publics? Are they spaces constructed through networked technologies (arenas) or imagined collectives that emerge as the result of the intersection of people, technology, and practices (publics)? What happens when the key actors here …

Up next in this final ICA 2024 conference session is Niklas Venema, whose focus is also on counterpublics. These have become a key concept for analysing polarised and fragmented communication environments in hybrid media systems, with the focus initially mainly on empowering counterpublics that support marginalised communities, while more recently we have also needed to theorise far-right counterpublics that require a further adaptation of this concept.

What is being studied under this term, then, and how it is conceptualised? The present study conducted a literature search of English and German articles between 2000 and 2023, identifying some 139 relevant articles …

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Linjie Dai, whose interest is in affective counterpublics. His focus is especially on the experience of Chinese immigrants in the Chinese exclusion area of American politics.

The concept of affective publics emerges from a dissatisfaction with the Habermasian conceptualisation of the public sphere, which overemphasises rationality and sees affect and emotion as problematic. Even affect theory tends to ignore the role of race and racism in power relations and affect, however.

The experience of Chinese diasporic networks in the United States in the 19th and 20th century, well before the …

The final (yay, made it!) session at this ICA 2024 conference starts with the wonderful Wiebke Loosen, whose work is interested in the reconfiguration of the public sphere; she points out that even two decades ago Peter Dahlgren already pointed out that ‘the’ public sphere is actually plural, and consists of a wide range of various overlapping publics that are interconnected and networked in various ways.

This represents a refiguration of public communication, which draws on relational and process sociology that emphasises the relational structures of the social world and the dynamics in and between these relations. This also signals …