Polarisation and Partisanship: A Research Agenda for My Australian Laureate Fellowship

In July 2021, I was exceptionally honoured to be awarded an Australian Laureate Fellowship: a five-year, A$3.5 million research grant that represents the highest level of individual recognition by the Australian Research Council (ARC). Laureate Fellowships are exceedingly rare – no more than 17 are awarded each year, and they go very predominantly to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines; indeed, as far as I can tell, mine was the first awarded to a researcher from the Media and Communication field in the 13 years of the scheme’s existence.

Most importantly, the Laureate Fellowship enables me to build a team of four Postdoctoral Research Associates (five-year, full-time postdoctoral positions) and four PhD researchers (three-year PhD scholarships) starting in early 2022, plus another four PhD positions to follow mid-project, in 2024. The whole team will be based with me and our excellent community of research staff and students at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane, Australia. If these positions are of interest to you, read on (and if you know of others who might be interested, please share this information with them)…

Commencing formally in February 2022, my Laureate project addresses the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation in online communication. It continues a trajectory of recent work that began with my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, which in turn sparked the 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real? that examined in some more detail whether there was any evidence for the claims that ‘filter bubbles’ and ‘echo chambers’ were increasingly enclosing us all in ideologically pure information environments on digital and social media platforms. (Spoiler: there wasn’t.)

I ended that book with a call to action: if the problem wasn’t simply technological (‘social media create filter bubbles’), then what is driving the increase in hyperpartisanship and polarisation that we seem to be experiencing in many countries around the world? Indeed, stepping back a little further  from that premise, is polarisation actually increasing? Can we use digital trace data to assess this, and systematically compare such assessments over time (to measure the speed of change) and across national contexts (to examine whether some political and media systems are more resilient than others)?

I’ve also outlined my path towards these questions, and the Laureate Fellowship, in my recent QUTeX talk during the ADM+S News & Media Symposium – I hope this provides a useful introduction to these concerns, and overview of my research agenda from here (there’s also a follow-up post on the QUTeX blog):

Axel Bruns. “ Societies on the Brink: Understanding the Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation.” QUTeX talk presented at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, 30 Sep. 2021.

These are the challenges the Laureate project addresses, then. At this early stage, I envisage that these assessments might cover a number of key dimensions of polarisation: in the journalistic content produced by different news outlets; in the audiences accessing and engaging with such content; in public debates, on social media platforms and elsewhere, about specific current issues; and in the networks of interconnection and interaction on and across social media platforms. But these dimensions will evolve further as the postdocs and I develop the concrete research plans for our work, of course – particular with the postdocs bringing their own interests, expertise, and ideas to the project. We’ll address the comparison between national political and media contexts in the first place by comparing antagonistic Anglo democracies (Australia, the UK, the US) with consensus-based European systems (Germany, Switzerland, Denmark) – but here too there is still some scope to include other contexts.

Some of these ideas emerge directly from and substantially extend my previous work and broader research agenda in this general area, of course. With my colleagues in the QUT DMRC and elsewhere, I’ve already done quite a bit of work in examining the structure of social media networks, mapping the dynamics of debates around current topics, tracing engagement with mainstream and fringe news, etc. – in addition to developing conceptual frameworks for understanding the contemporary public sphere and the role of digital and social media platforms within it, and exploring and critiquing new methods of working with digital trace data. The five-year Laureate project enables us to upgrade our methodological approaches, to apply them to new questions and contexts, and to combine them with other qualitative as well as quantitative methods, and thereby to generate important new empirical insights, methodological workflows, and conceptual frameworks.

Jobs, Jobs, Jobs, Jobs

But first things first: to begin with, I’m now looking for four Postdoctoral Research Associates. These four positions are five-year, full-time, fixed-term appointments, and are open to all Australian and international applicants with the qualifications required; we’ve just posted the job advertisement on the QUT recruitment site. Applications for these research jobs are due by 30 January 2022, and we hope to select the successful applicants by the end of February, to start their jobs as soon as possible afterwards (happy to work around any remaining travel restrictions or delays that may still be in place at that time, of course).

If you’re planning to apply, make sure you follow the ‘How to Apply’ section in the job ad (on p. 3): include a CV; address each of the selection criteria in your application letter; and include a statement that outlines your interest in a specific dimension of polarisation. To be clear: there are no right or wrong answers to that last requirement, and it doesn’t lock you into a specific research approach if you do get the job – but I do want to understand how you might approach a particular aspect of polarisation, based on your existing research expertise and skills. The job advertisement also contains my contact details – so do get in touch if you have any questions about whether you are eligible for these positions, or want to discuss whether you are suited for these jobs.

With the successful four Postdoctoral Research Associates, I’m planning to build a strong and productive team that sits within the broader collegial environment of the DMRC and collaborates widely with our other researchers. There will be opportunities to engage with the other DMRC research programmes and groups, with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society, and with our network of national and international research partners. I’m also hoping that one or more of these postdocs will be able to apply for ARC DECRA Fellowships before the end of their time with me, and to be involved in other competitive government and industry grant schemes – I’ll mentor you through these application processes. In the DMRC we have a very strong track record with such grants (at the moment we host two DECRAs and one Future Fellow in addition to my Laureate Fellowship, for example), and we’ll make sure this continues with this next generation of early-career researchers.

Scholarships, Scholarships, Scholarships, Scholarships

And if you’re a little earlier in your career still, but also interested in these topics, I have four three-year PhD scholarships on offer, too. I’ll say a little less about these here, as we’ll advertise them as part of QUT’s next scholarship round in early 2022 – but if you’re interested, please do get in touch. While there are still a few travel restrictions in place right now, these will be open to both domestic and international students, and will close in March 2022; your enrolment will commence in mid-2022, in time for semester two at QUT. The PhD projects will align with the overall research agenda of the Laureate project, and you’ll be supervised by me and one of the postdocs (other DMRC colleagues may also be involved); there will also be excellent opportunities to engage and collaborate with our wider community of researchers. More on these scholarships when the 2022 application round opens!

Finally, and for a little more background on the Australian Laureate Fellowship and its research agenda, I was also interviewed about the award by QUT’s Real World News channel: