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The final speaker for this session, and the ACSPRI 2024 conference overall, is María Larrea, and her interest is in the learning journeys of airline cabin crews. María has worked as a flight attendant and crew trainer and manager herself, and questions the extent to which formal training actually prepares cabin crew for their work.

Such training is often in a formal setting in classrooms rather than simulated cabin environments; the airline industry is highly regulated, and cabin crew activities are highly influenced by psychological perspectives, but drawing on sociocultural perspectives that see learning as a situated experience in natural …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kelly Edwards, whose focus is on healthcare provision: how do we measure what actually matters to patients? Surveying experiences rather than merely satisfaction is important here: qualitative, real-time surveys that were co-created with patients and are used to share feedback with nurses should be seen as the most desirable aim here, but are uncommon in everyday practice.

This is a call for participatory action research, then: a collaborative, iterative approach that is action-oriented. Such research is not easy, however, especially within standard ethics frameworks that require the research project to …

The next speaker in this final ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Kirstie Northfield, whose focus is on conducting interviews with adolescents through instant messaging services. This is in the service of a project on adolescent mobbing. Plenty of work has been done on quality of life assessments for adolescents through parents and teachers as proxy reporters, but these are not always accurate: in parallel reporting tests, mothers’ assessments appear to be most closely matched to adolescents’ actual experiences, while teachers’ reports have not been well tested by by parallel studies.

Who, then, is a reliable judge of adolescent wellbeing? How …

The final session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference starts with Carly Gardner, whose focus is on the impact of form school uniform policies on physical activities in school kids. Physical activity is critically important in improving health and protecting against chronic diseases, but school uniforms are often very formal and restrict movement; some schools therefore allow kids to wear their sports uniforms at least one day per week, and there may be an argument to use these as everyday uniforms.

From a first survey, 62% of school students surveyed would support this approach, but further research is required to examine …

I’m the next speaker at the ACSPRI 2024 conference, presenting our new practice mapping method for this study of multimodal networks. Slides are below:

The final speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sidiq Madya, whose interest is in the discussion of the idea of data sovereignty by civil society organisations. Data sovereignty is a spectrum of approaches by nation states to subject data flows to national jurisdictions, and/or the ability or right of individuals to control their personal data and information.

This addresses the misuse and abuse of personal data for surveillance or microtargeting, seeks to mitigate increasing datafication, and seeks alternative models of data governance that limit the free flow of data and encourage local data ownership. There are a large …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Nicholas Corbett, whose focus is on ties between the alt-right, Gamergate, and the MAGA movement on Reddit. This entanglement has taken place for the best part of the past ten years or so, but exactly how strong are the links between these groups, and how does this manifest on Reddit’s?

This project explores a network of some 51 relevant subreddits that share a certain amount of participants. The focus here is especially on the subreddit’s core constituency: those users who participate more in the specific subreddit than in any of …

The third speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Mingming Cheng, whose focus is on the use of multi-modal data in the analysis of modern slavery risks on social media. Modern slavery includes forced labour, forced marriage, human trafficking, debt bondage, and other related practices; it targets vulnerable individuals, and these might also be identified through social media (for instance through ads or recruitment posts that mimic ordinary advertising).

Such content can spread very rapidly, and identifying and regulating it is very difficult. It requires a multi-modal approach that analyses visual, audio, and text data, and the present project …

The second speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Eve Cheng, whose interest is in party structures in parliamentary networks – party structures here means personal and professional backgrounds, including military and civilian careers, party memberships, educational track records, etc.

The assumption here is that such backgrounds might determine party structures, predict electoral success, and affect policy-making. Key metrics here were average maximal flow (assessing the global network) and transitivity (focussing on local structures), and a comparison between these two networks is especially interesting.

In 1960s Australian Labor, for instance, there was one large trade unionist cluster, with one …

The second day at the ACSPRI 2024 conference dawns with a session on social network mapping, and starts with a paper by our wonderful conference chair Rob Ackland. This presents work on an international collaboration around technology and political communication, with a particular focus on social bots. This explores especially the potential for such bots to connect people with different ideas online, with the aim to improve public discourse.

This requires us, in the first place, to understand where discussion and deliberation are occurring in online spaces: deliberative conversations require both diversity (or representation of different ideas) and argumentation (a …