I presented in and chaired the Saturday morning session at the AoIR 2024 conference, which was on polarisation in news publishing and engagement, so no liveblogging this time. However, here are the slides from the three presentations that our various teams and I were involved in.
We started with my QUT DMRC colleague Laura Vodden, who discussed our plans for manual and automated content coding of news content for indicators of polarisation, and especially highlighted the surprising difficulties in getting access to quality and comprehensive news content data:
I presented the second paper in this session, on patterns of communication in the failed 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum on improving representation and participation for Australia’s Indigenous peoples. As part of this we also developed a new methodology we describe as practice mapping – more detail on this later. Here are the slides:
The post-lunch session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference starts with my excellent QUT colleague Tariq Choucair, whose interest is in measuring polarising discourses during election campaigns. Tariq and the team have developed a method to measure polarisation at the level of specific discourses: it is rooted in core principles and operationalised approaches that are adaptable to other contexts. Measuring polarisation at the discourse level is important; so far, so much of the work on polarisation has been done using surveys on self-reported political positioning or feelings towards leaders or parties, or has drawn on voting patterns …
The next speakers at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference are my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard and Samantha Vilkins, presenting the emerging findings from an ongoing literature review of the concept of populism, continuing on from our review of the polarisation concept. Contrary to polarisation, populism is rather more clearly defined, with works by Mudde and Laclau emerging as particularly central if somewhat competing definitions.
These variously define populism as a thin-centred ideology (Mudde) and discursive opposition between the elites and the people (Laclau); such definitions have been applied to populist phenomena in media, medicine, religion, and other …
