Polarisation

I disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:

Polarisation, Destructive or Otherwise

Central to the work of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship has been the development of our concept of destructive polarisation, and exploration of the five key symptoms we’ve identified for it: (a) breakdown of communication; (b) discrediting and dismissing of information; (c) erasure of complexities; (d) exacerbated attention to and space for extreme voices; and (e) exclusion through emotions. The point here is to distinguish such clearly problematic dynamics from other forms of polarisation that are more quotidian and benign, and may even be beneficial as they enable different sides of an argument to better define what they stand for. Where polarisation becomes destructive, on the other hand, mainstream political and societal cohesion declines and fails (and aren’t we seeing a lot of that at the moment…). I’ve got to pay tribute here to my Laureate Fellowship team, and especially the four Postdoctoral Research Associates Katharina Esau, Tariq dos Santos Choucair, Sebastian Svegaard, and Samantha Vilkins – Katharina in particular drove the development of this concept from its first presentation at the 2023 ICA conference in Toronto to the comprehensive journal article which has now been published in Information, Communication & Society:

Katharina Esau, Tariq Choucair, Samantha Vilkins, Sebastian F.K. Svegaard, Axel Bruns, Kate O'Connor-Farfan, and Carly Lubicz-Zaorski. “Destructive Polarization in Digital Communication Contexts: A Critical Review and Conceptual Framework.” Information, Communication & Society, 2024. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2024.2413127.

Meanwhile, I’ve led the writing on a second article that also outlines this concept and provides some further examples for its symptoms. This has now been published in the new Routledge Handbook of Political Campaigning, and counts as our first publication in 2025: