ICA 2023

Now that the ICA 2023 and IAMCR 2023 conferences are over and I’m back in Brisbane with a little time before the next round of conferences (ECREA PolCom in Berlin in August, Future of Journalism in Cardiff in September, and AoIR in Philadelphia in October), I’m finally finding some time to update this blog with some new publications as well – in addition to the various conference presentations and papers I already shared in previous posts.

First, I’m really pleased to have published a conceptual article in a special issue of the Communication Theory journal that was edited by Mike Schäfer and Mark Eisenegger. Here, I’m returning to my long-standing interest in dragging public sphere theory kicking and screaming into the digital age, by outlining a number of the fundamental building blocks of the network of publics that has become our everyday reality, and identifying some of the empirical approaches we may use to study those building blocks and their interrelationships in situ. Written in late 2022, many of the examples I use to illustrate these approaches are still drawn from waning social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, so one of the next challenges for our field will need to be to translate these approaches to new and emerging online platforms – and that will certainly also be an important aspect of my work over the coming years.

Axel Bruns. “From ‘the’ Public Sphere to a Network of Publics: Towards an Empirically Founded Model of Contemporary Public Communication Spaces.” Communication Theory, June 2023. DOI: 10.1093/ct/qtad007.

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.