Politics

It’s Wednesday in Brisbane, and I’m at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre which I co-organised with the wonderful Jessica Gabriele Walter, Anja Bechmann, and Daniel Kreiss; we start our first plenary session with Florian Primig.

The final presenter at the ICA 2024 conference is Florian Primig, whose interest is in how we make sense of misinformation. He participated in an expert citizen council in Germany that explored the question of misinformation, which sparked him to rethink these concepts – we ought to try some critical introspection and consider the societal factors that have challenged the established knowledge order and enabled the emergence of counter-knowledge orders.

Up next in this final ICA 2024 conference session is Niklas Venema, whose focus is also on counterpublics. These have become a key concept for analysing polarised and fragmented communication environments in hybrid media systems, with the focus initially mainly on empowering counterpublics that support marginalised communities, while more recently we have also needed to theorise far-right counterpublics that require a further adaptation of this concept.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Linjie Dai, whose interest is in affective counterpublics. His focus is especially on the experience of Chinese immigrants in the Chinese exclusion area of American politics.

The concept of affective publics emerges from a dissatisfaction with the Habermasian conceptualisation of the public sphere, which overemphasises rationality and sees affect and emotion as problematic. Even affect theory tends to ignore the role of race and racism in power relations and affect, however.

The final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Jisoo Kim, whose interest is in the shaping of communication flows about Ukraine across English, French, and German communities. Such efforts are part of information warfare, aiming to win the battle for public opinion and perception; Russia, in particular, is employing state media and troll armies to disseminate its propaganda about the causes and progress of its war against Ukraine. More recently, this has also include nuclear threats, rhetoric, and diplomacy.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, whose interest is in visual political communication across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter in Brazil in the 2018 and 2022 presidential elections. Visual affordances are critically important in political campaigning, and such affordances continue to change; this works differently across different platforms, and cross-platform and/or multi-platform studies are therefore also critically important.