ANZCA 2017

The next speaker at ANZCA 2017 is Mary Simpson, who discusses the perspective of ethics review panels in addressing approvals for social media research projects. Ethics committees often remain poorly informed about social media research, and have little practical experience in such research themselves. Traditional approaches to participant engagement and consent are not necessarily well suited to research approaches that utilise APIs for data gathering.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2017 session is Kim Barbour, whose focus is on ethical engagement with research participants in social media research. Social media research can be understood as human subjects research, yet we often do not have direct contact with the people whom we study: their communicative activities are being gathered through automated means, and the subjects are not usually even aware of this fact.

The next session at ANZCA 2017 deals with social media and ethics, and starts with Jonathon Hutchinson. This needs to be tackled from a number of different perspectives. For instance, what ethical choices are being made as publishers approve or reject the comments being posted in response to their articles? What are the implications of these choices, for public debate in general and for specific groups and individuals being vilified in particular?

Coming up next at ANZCA 2017 is Lyell Durkin, who shifts our interest to the media representations of skateboarding (now also an official sport of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games). There are many different views of skateboarding, but skateboarders themselves are regarding their practices as an art and a lifestyle; this view is also represented in the skate media emerging from the community itself.

Next up at ANZCA 2017 is Chris Chesher, who begins by pointing out the increasing role of real estate agents as media producers. Agents selling homes produce public representations of private spaces, portraying the home to be sold as personal and family space, and offering it up for (mediated as well as in-person) inspection. In Australia this occurs mainly through one or both of the duopoly sites Domain and RealEstate.com.au.

The next ANZCA 2017 speaker is Glen Fuller, who begins from a focus on cycling cultures. Cycling spans a number of research areas from transport and urban planning to cultural studies and health; there have been a series of national cycling strategies, which always aim to increase the number of people actively engaged in cycling, but these rarely achieve their lofty aims, and it is therefore necessary to further explore the reasons for the present stagnation.

After a great opening panel at ANZCA 2017 (which I didn't blog because discussion panels are generally too difficult to blog) I'm now in the first paper session, which starts with Pip Shea's paper on maker spaces. She presents a number of case studies from around the world, including the cross-sectarian Temple project from Northern Ireland; these create local civic communication worlds.