ANZCA 2023

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Caryn Coatney, whose focus is on the data journalism of the ABC’s Digital Story Innovation team. Data journalism has evolved considerably over the past years, with the initial focus on data visualisation giving way to a broader role that in some news organisations also includes the maximising of news content engagement metrics through clickbait.

The next speaker at ANZCA 2023 is Sky Marsen, whose interest is in health communication during crisis. This involves matters of personal and social identity and high levels of scientific uncertainty that motivate many to look to opposing discourses from religious and other sources. The present project explored culturally diverse contexts in developing nations, and focusses here on a case study of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16.

The final session at ANZCA 2023 that I’m attending starts with Alex Beattie, whose interest is in news avoidance in Aotearoa. This usually refers to intentional news avoidance, but it is not always clear just how intentional such avoidance is; broader media platform choices might also have an impact on whether and how people see the news, for instance.

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Kirsty O’Callaghan, whose interest is in the role of gender in effective climate change communication. The important role of women at the heart of climate action has long been recognised, but climate change communication must also be multi-dimensional and involve a diversity of voices – Greta Thunberg’s success in her climate advocacy demonstrates this.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

The next session that I’m in at at ANZCA 2023 is on media and climate change, and starts with my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague Carly Lubicz-Zaorski, whose focus is on the mainstream media framing of UNESCO’s ‘in danger’ rating for the Great Barrier Reef on the Australian northeast coast.

And the final paper in this ANZCA 2023 session is by Petra Theunissen, whose focus is on the ‘Sovereign Citizen’ movement in Aotearoa and Australia. This is a non-prosocial activist movement, which believes in the illegitimacy of government institutions and sees itself as subject to laws only as they interpret and consent to them. This morphed from a far-right, white supremacist posse comitatus into a broader movement that now overlaps (but is not the same as) other movements including anti-vaxxers, conspiracists, and other groups.

The next speakers in this ANZCA 2023 session are Claire Fitzpatrick and Ashleigh Haw, who extend our focus to a comparative analysis of the ‘freedom’ movements in Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia. In Aotearoa, the protest was organised by a diverse group of participants without clear leadership, and the atmosphere around the protest declined precipitously as prosocial and family-oriented protests were overwhelmed by some much darker messages calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government.

The last day at ANZCA 2023 starts for me with a session on ‘freedom’ movements, and we begin with Ciaran Ryan and a paper on the 2022 ‘Convoy to Canberra’. This was a gathering of some 10,000 Australians in Canberra in early February 2022 to protest COVID-19 measures, and was inspired to some extent by the Canadian ‘Freedom Convoy’ to Ottawa, which blocked the city centre. Both convoys were largely organised and promoted through social media.

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Cathy Greenfield, whose interest is in communication studies’ contribution to ‘talking country’ at a time of global crisis. This must necessarily proceed through cross-cultural engagement between First Nations and non-Indigenous people, and is especially important in the context of enduring and renewed struggles for Indigenous sovereignty.