A Busy End to the Year

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am. My stay here also involves a couple of teaching roles: I’m teaching an undergraduate course that builds on my 2018 book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (and I’m hoping to make those lecture recordings available publicly at some point, in case they’re of use in other teaching) and a Masters seminar that explores the many concepts for what has now replaced ‘the’ public sphere (and I’m hoping to convert those ideas and discussions into some new writing eventually, too). Plus, there are plenty of opportunities for future collaborations between the IKMZ and my home institution, the QUT Digital Media Research Centre.

But while I’m here in the centre of Europe I’m also taking the opportunity to connect with a number of key colleagues and communities in my field. Next week, on 13-14 October 2022, I’ll be at the Norwegian Media Research Conference in Stavanger, where I’ve been invited to present one of the keynotes and will outline some of the ideas that are also animating my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project on the drivers and dynamics of partisanship and polarisation.

In the following week, I’m at the biennial ECREA conference in Aarhus (18-24 Oct.), where I’m presenting our research on the 2022 Australian federal election in a pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, offering a workshop on working with Twitter data in Tableau in another pre-conference on Digital Research Methods, co-presenting two papers on our mis- and disinformation research in the main conference, and presenting a keynote on the role of (tabloid and celebrity) journalists in the amplification of conspiracy theories in a post-conference on Digital Media and Information Disorders. And after that, I’m visiting dear friends at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg to explore further collaboration opportunities before co-hosting a one-day symposium on Populism, Polarisation, and Propaganda here in Zürich, together with the IKMZ’s Mike Schäfer.

And in the week after that, it’s the long-awaited return of the Association of Internet Researchers conference to in-person conference mode, in Dublin (2-5 Nov.). As a former President of AoIR I’m extremely excited to re-connect with this wonderful community, of course, and I’m involved in a panel that brings together four papers on the recent German and Australian federal elections. Can’t wait to see you all again!

From Dublin I’m then travelling straight to Passau, for a series of workshops between our QUT DMRC team and Florian Töpfl’s RUSINFORM research group, which investigates Russian propaganda and influence efforts. Led on our side by my excellent colleague Sofya Glazunova, our joint project is currently examining the reach of Russian state propaganda and disinformation outlets like RT, and the major platforms’ responses to the circulation of their content.

And finally, after a little downtime back in Zürich, I’ll also visit the brilliant Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin (where I have a number of connections, but have been unable to visit so far, thanks to the pandemic) on 21-23 November, as well as visiting my colleague Folker Hanusch at the Journalism Studies Center at the University of Vienna on 12-14 December. At both institutions, I’ll present a couple of guest talks and workshops.

Sooo, quite a busy European autumn – but if you’re in the neighbourhood (any of those neighbourhoods), please say hi! I’ll update the blog further with details of all those presentations as they happen, of course, and I’m hoping to finally do some conference liveblogging again too.

Plus, there are a few (quite a few) new presentations that have come out over the past few months – but I think I’ll leave those for another update…