Politics

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is my QUT colleague (and freshly minted DECRA Fellow) Katharina Esau, whose interest is especially in patterns of polarisation within the media coverage of climate change. She begins by noting that polarisation remains a poorly defined concept, which includes notions of issue-based, ideological, affective, perceived, value-based, and other forms of polarisation.

News media are usually perceived as polarised, too, but there is no robust way of assessing biases in and polarisation between different media outlets. This project, therefore, gathered data from some 26 Australian mainstream and fringe media outlets …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.

Our slides are below:

The third speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Natasha van Antwerpen, whose focus is also on the 2025 Australian federal election. Her interest is in the role of mis- and disinformation during the election. This connects with overall concerns about the effects of mis- and disinformation on societal cohesion, trust in institutions, moral decline, antisocial and harmful behaviours, etc.

Her project examined what mis- and disinformation individuals encountered during the election campaign. This was done through an experience survey: participants installed an app on their phones that would regularly ask them to report on their experiences …

The next speaker in this session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is Edward Hurcombe, whose focus is also on news in the 2025 Australian federal election. News consumption is now increasingly fragmented, with a growing number of younger voters no longer engaging with mainstream, legacy media; influencers were therefore invited to the 2025 budget lockdown, and PM Anthony Albanese appeared on influencer Abbie Chatfield’s podcast.

How was the election covered across traditional and social media news outlets in Australia, then? How do they imagine their audiences? Data were gathered from ABC News, The Age, The Guardian, news.com.au, and …

I’ll present in the first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, but we start with Kevin Tan, whose focus is on digital media strategies and voter engagement during the 2025 elections in Singapore and Australia. There is continued strong investment in digital communication by political parties, but in Australia in 2025 record ad spending coincided with declining digital engagement; in Singapore, opposition parties enjoyed strong digital momentum but this did not translate into editorial success.

Online attention tells one story, then, but the ballot box tells quite another: online signals are not reliable predictors of election outcomes. What exactly …

And the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen ends with a final keynote, by Alenda Chang. She shifts our focus to gaming, as explored from an environmental media studies perspective. Media have become more than passive vessels through which we contemplate the world; they also act upon the world, much as we do.

Game worlds have plenty to tell us about ecological relations, and structure many of the environments that we encounter on our devices; they are also entwined with such environments through augmented reality and other new features. So, the bifurcation between the textual analysis of games and studies …

The next speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Scott Ellis, whose focus is on online expressions of heteronormativity. The US has a problem with young male suicide, for instance, and this is often a problem related to evolving masculine identities and sexualities; men are forming new types of bonds with each other, but this also leads to slurs from others.

Can straight men be gatekeepers of inclusive environments, then: this may redefine sex and aggravate (mediatised) heteronormativity, and results in many confused questions and positions about American masculinity. In turn, this is affecting …

The next session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen starts with Alessia Pensabene’s paper on feminist content creators on Instagram in Italy, and the way they are redefining political engagement for the digital age. These creators are usually not traditional activists, but ordinary users who have gained a large number of followers on Instagram and discuss feminist topics from personal experience – as women, as mothers, as survivors of gender-based violence.

Some such creators have more followers than official accounts of feminist organisations; this also affords them considerable influence as promoters of feminist books and other content, participants …

The next speaker in this session at the ZeMKI 20th anniversary conference in Bremen is Johanna Wahl, whose interest is in visual political communication on social media. How do the mediatisation and circulation of political images reshape protest forms; how can hybrid and algorithmically conditioned protest practices be analysed through their online visual representation?

Johanna focusses here on protest as a communicative action, and posting, sharing, liking online translates this to the digital environment. Images are important to this: they are embedded into digital media environments that shape communication and meaning, and protest collectives are therefore also increasingly focussing on …