The final speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my excellent colleague Laura Vodden, presenting on the methodology of our ongoing analysis of climate coverage in the Australian media. This explores patterns of polarisation within journalistic content, but polarisation is not particularly well-defined in the literature, so we have developed the concept of destructive polarisation as an approach to defining when polarisation becomes problematic.
There is no clear information on how polarised the Australian media landscape is. Therefore, this project examines climate change coverage across some 26 Australian news outlets from the mainstream to the …
The next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore is my great QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Sebastian Svegaard, presenting progress findings from a large literature review on populism. We have previously observed how poorly defined the concept of polarisation is in the literature; there are many forms of polarisation that scholars have identified, but hardly and overarching perspectives.
This project took a similar approach to the concept of populism, which turns out to be better defined; dominant in this is Cas Mudde’s definition of populism as a thin ideology that highlights divisions between ‘us’ …
I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.
Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.
I’m the second speaker in this session at the workshop of the Bots Building Bridges project in Bielefeld, presenting our work on destructive polarisation and the practice mapping approach as a method to identify its symptoms. Here are the slides, and more information about the practice mapping approach is available in our recent article in Social Media + Society. I’ve also provided an introduction to the approach in this blog post from a few weeks ago.
I'm about to head off on a brief trip to Germany for a series of conferences and presentations, so this seems like a good moment for another update on recent developments. First off, I'm delighted to finally have a first publication out in the great Social Media + Society journal that introduces our new methodological approach of practice mapping. I've teased this in a few past posts and presentations already, not least in my keynote at the ACSPRI conference in November 2024, but together with my great QUT colleagues Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden …
The 2025 Australian federal election is in full swing, with just over one week to go before the 3 May 2025 election date. As in previous elections, my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have been following the social media campaign with particular interest, and have now published a mid-campaign update on the electioneering process as it's unfolded especially on Facebook and Instagram – our overview of current patterns and dynamics is now live on the DMRC Website.
Our work is made considerably more difficult, though, by the severe deterioration of data access to leading …
