Politics

Following on from the videos I shared in the previous post, here’s a round-up of a few recent presentations. These are all from the 2023 International Communication Association conference in Toronto, and mostly from my Laureate Fellowship project on polarisation and partisanship.

And coming up shortly: our presentations and my liveblogging from IAMCR 2023 in Lyon!

But back to Toronto: first, my colleague Sebastian Svegaard presented our study of political leaders’ posts across four national elections at an ICA pre-conference on comparative research over time, across platforms, and across nations – and we focussed especially on that cross-national comparison. The slides alone may not do it justice, but there’s a huge amount of work behind this analysis of a broad range of affective signalling by lead election candidates in Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú, and the patterns that are emerging from this are fascinating. Still more work to do in analysing and processing this, but expect more insights from this research at a conference near you soon…

Sebastian Svegaard, Tariq Choucair, Kate O'Connor Farfan, and Axel Bruns. “Affective Polarisation in Political Leaders' Discourses: A Comparison between Australia, Brazil, Denmark, and Perú.” Paper presented at the ICA 2023 preconference Comparative Digital Political Communication: Comparisons across Countries, Platforms, and Time, Toronto, 25 May 2023.

The past few months have been quite busy with conferences and events, so here’s a quick update on what I’ve been up to recently. I’ll start here with a handful of videos from recent events – more on my recent and upcoming conference papers, journal articles, and book chapters in subsequent posts…

First, in May I was delighted to participate in a three-part series on “Future-Proofing the Public Sphere”, hosted by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance and the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, and the Digital Media Research Centre at QUT, where I work, which featured separate public talks from my fellow Australian Laureate Fellow John Dryzek from the University of Canberra and me and then put us in conversation in a final event. While we’re coming from different fields, our perspectives on current issues were remarkably aligned, so this was a very fruitful exchange, and I’m very thankful to my Canberra colleagues for initiating this series of events. In the original order of presentations, here are the videos of our talks.

I began the series on 2 May 2023 with my talk “The Filter in Our (?) Heads: Digital Media and Polarisation”, outlining the overall motivations for and agenda of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project:

Axel Bruns. “The Filter in Our (?) Heads: Digital Media and Polarisation.” First presentation in the Future-Proofing the Public Sphere series, Brisbane / Canberra, 2 May 2023.