When grief becomes social media content, boundaries between private mourning and public spectacle dissolve. This article examines how romantic relationship dissolution, or breakup, emerges as grief content on TikTok. Using qualitative content analysis of a breakup grief influencer's TikTok account as a case study, it explores how narratives of breakup grief are produced, circulated, and consumed on the platform. The analysis identifies three key dynamics: the mobilisation of positivity as a healing resource, the construction of ideals of the perfect self, and the formation of a niche community centred on breakup grief. The findings demonstrate how experiences of romantic loss are transformed into content capital, positioning grief as both a personal experience and a cultural resource on the platform. The article argues that influencer-mediated breakup grief not only reflects experiences of loss but also shapes the emotional norms and meanings through which grief is understood and communicated within platform cultures.
Aboriginal knowers and knowledges have historically been sidelined in accounts of ‘authoritative’ information about us across a range of knowledge institutions. This epistemic exclusion catalysed struggles to self-represent and counter dominant images and stories, critically reread histories, and reframe the way issues that concern us are understood and discussed. Google is a powerful epistemic actor. Through design choices, Google can facilitate self-representation or reinforce the authority claimed by others to represent Aboriginal peoples. The integration of large language models into search systems is reshaping how users encounter and engage with information online, raising urgent questions about online visibility and representation. What representations are prioritised in Google's direct answers? Which knowers are treated as authoritative? What does this mean for Indigenous representation? This paper contributes to the empirical basis for reflection on these critical questions with a case study of Google AI overviews. Using thematic and close textual analysis of a corpus of question-direct answer pairs, the study offers insights into how AI overviews reinforce or accommodate challenges to dominant discourses, and more generally how ubiquitous, everyday applications of AI are affecting Aboriginal self-representation. The article argues that the shift to AI-generated search results severs links between knowers, knowledge and context in different and subtle ways, with serious implications for Indigenous representation, rereading and reframing.
This qualitative study examines how Chilean women researchers perceive and experience their visibility as expert sources in news media. Drawing on Social Representations Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis, the research explores the meanings participants attribute to media visibility, expertise, and public authority. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 12 doctoral academics from diverse disciplines and regions of Chile. Findings reveal that media visibility is shaped by institutional structures, journalistic routines, and gendered expectations regarding expertise. Participants identified multiple barriers, including academic workload, limited institutional support, bureaucratic communication processes, and persistent gender biases in source selection. The study also reveals tensions between scientific and media representations of expertise: while researchers associate expertise with specialization and epistemic responsibility, they perceive media environments as rewarding visibility, availability, and confidence. The findings contribute to scholarships on gender, media, and science communication by demonstrating how expert authority is socially constructed and gendered within contemporary media systems.
Media literacy education – typically embedded within secondary school Media Studies classes – routinely begins by analysing popular culture texts to reveal how gender identity is represented. By contrast, this study starts with the day-to-day experiences and opinions of young people, asking them who they admire, and the values associated with those people before turning to media texts. Foregrounding lived experience, I argue, better informs media literacy practices and advances scholarship on gender identity. This also addresses gaps in how young people's perspectives are integrated into media literacy research. This shift matters because young people's direct encounters are typically treated as secondary or anecdotal. The study was conducted with two senior secondary school media-studies cohorts (ages 17–18) over 2 weeks in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. I centre learners’ personal and social contexts within classroom practice. This, in turn, creates richer opportunities for reflection and provides a more fruitful starting point for analysing media texts and negotiating gendered identities. The findings show that older adolescents can identify gendered behaviours and aspects of gender performativity in figures they admire; however, their willingness to critically interrogate socially embedded gender norms varies considerably. Dominant misogynistic and anti-feminist discourses remained prominent in participants’ responses – more so than anticipated – despite New Zealand's reputation as a progressive liberal democracy. This tension informs the framing of the article's title, ‘Where Are All the Woke Kids?’
The representation of male primary school teachers in British and Australian newspapers is a topic of increasing importance, given the ongoing discussions surrounding gender equality in education and broader societal perceptions of men in caregiving roles. Despite efforts to diversify the teaching profession, male teachers remain a minority in primary education. In this paper, we argue that media representations play a crucial role in shaping societal perceptions and attitudes towards gender roles and men in teaching. This paper aims to provide a critical analysis of how the media discusses and portrays primary school teachers, focusing on the discourses, themes, and underlying ideologies present in their representations. To achieve this, we examine the discourse surrounding male primary school teachers in newspapers from the United Kingdom and Australia through the lens of critical discourse analysis (CDA) from 2020 to 2023. Through a content and CDA of newspaper articles, this study explores how male primary school teachers are portrayed, the stereotypes perpetuated, and the implications for gender equality in the education sector. The findings highlight persistent gender biases and suggest the need for more nuanced and balanced representations of male teachers in the media.
Search engines are a common pathway to conspiracy theories, and producers of conspiratorial narratives actively encourage users to search for particular terms. Understanding how search engines respond to different information-seeking practices is therefore essential for explaining the dynamics of online conspiracy theories. Existing audits of search engines rarely account for systematic variation in query formulation arising from users’ differing levels of engagement with conspiratorial beliefs, nor do they consider recently introduced AI-powered search features. To address this gap, we developed search query sets informed by conspiratorial and non-conspiratorial information-seeking practices of online forums, using the chemtrails and 15-minute cities conspiracy theories as case studies. We performed algorithmic audits of Google's first-page search results and AI Overview responses. Our findings show substantial differences in the information returned for queries representative of general public information seeking compared with those reflecting conspiratorial perspectives. These differences appear to arise partly from Google's efforts to moderate sensitive topics, but also from the limitations of those interventions in recognising and responding to conspiratorial modes of query formulation. AI Overviews likewise vary according to query framing and generally attempt to debunk conspiratorial claims. However, these responses are often brief, provide limited supporting evidence, and are less effective for the newer 15-minute cities conspiracy theory, suggesting that current AI-mediated search guardrails remain uneven and require further development.
This article brings together three events that animated the Australian media landscape in 2023: responses to Stan Grant's commentary on the coronation of King Charles III, coverage of the Voice to Parliament referendum by the Australian public broadcaster, and reporting on the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel. These three disparate but temporally connected events will be brought together to document and outline recent incidents of metajournalistic discourse in Australia. By mapping these three media events, the article asks: what does Australian metajournalistic discourse look like? What can these three events tell us about the current boundaries of Australian journalism? And what issues and tensions animate the practice and discussion of journalism in Australia? While each case is different, together they demonstrate broader concerns about journalistic practices and shifting news values, and around the changing deployment of objectivity in Australian journalism. This article argues that these discourses, rather than simply capturing a moment of media debate, are formative of the practice of Australian journalism at a time when the industry is facing threats of a technological, economic and political nature. By better understanding these discourses, we can gain an insight into the shape that Australian journalism may take into the future.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed a persistent innovation–inclusion paradox: while states rapidly deployed digital solutions for pandemic management, they often failed to prioritise accessibility and disability inclusion from the outset. This article takes Australia as its case study to interrogate the country's response to the pandemic and the digital strategies adopted, focusing on the inclusion of people with disability. Through an analysis of the official state reviews and independent submissions of disability organisations, this article finds that successful strategies included listening to local voices, collaborating with trusted community leaders and influencers, expanding access to telehealth and remote work and adopting diverse communication channels to ensure public information was available in multiple languages and formats. As Australia faces ongoing public health challenges and climate-related emergencies, the lessons from COVID-19 underscore that true inclusion cannot be achieved through rapid digital innovation alone but requires a proactive, sustained commitment to accessibility and inclusion.
In the past two decades, far-right movements have gained significant power in a variety of countries around the world, coinciding with increasing cooperation between far-right actors across borders. While the transnational convergence of these movements has been documented at elite and institutional levels, there has been limited investigation into the transnationalisation of the digital environments through which far-right narratives circulate. This article addresses this gap by examining the transnational far right through the lens of hyperpartisan news sources on YouTube. Through a novel data-gathering method, this study constructs a unique dataset comprising metadata from 114,025 videos and 51,449,494 comments across the entire lifetime of four channels, each based in a different English-speaking country. Using a unique combination of digital methods, including social network analysis and topic modelling, this article documents the content strategies of these hyperpartisan news sources and the resulting audiences across the entire lifespan of the channels. The findings reveal a highly integrated transnational far-right information space on YouTube with significant and sustained audience overlaps between the channels. Furthermore, the analysis identifies several strategies used by hyperpartisan news sources to attract and engage international audiences and raises critical questions about the transnational influence of the far right from the United States.
Donald Trump's political and rhetorical style has presented a challenge to journalists’ modus operandi since he first announced his candidacy for President. During the 2024 election campaign, the practice of ‘sanewashing’ became a talking point among media and political commentators. The term describes the way Donald Trump's rambling, generally unfocussed speech would appear more coherent (and ‘sane’) when it was presented in news reports. In this paper, we empirically test whether ‘sanewashing’ occurred during the 2024 election campaign, focussing on two speeches that drew the most criticism for how they were covered in the media: one delivered to the Economic Club of New York, and the other given at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Using topic modelling and semantic similarity analysis, we examine which components were covered and the language used in reporting. We conclude that while ‘sanewashing’ did occur, this may reflect standard journalistic procedures, rather than ideological motivations.
As trust in centralised social media platforms declines amid algorithmic harm, extractive data economies, and the erosion of psychological and epistemic safety, users are migrating toward smaller, semi-private digital spaces – a phenomenon some design and technology practitioners have termed the “cozy web.” While this shift is commonly characterised as retreat from digital publics, this paper offers the first sustained academic theorisation of the cosy web and the communities it gives rise to as a re-decentralisation of online social life and governance. Drawing on media and communication scholarship, feminist care ethics, and infrastructural critique, we conceptualise cosy communities as a distinct sociotechnical formation organised around care-centred governance, deliberate boundary-setting, and relational accountability – rather than visibility, automation, and scale. We build on the concept of cosy agency to describe the active work through which participants reconstruct stable, bounded digital environments in response to platform volatility, and draw on Giddens’ ontological security and Kelty's recursive publics to theorise the conditions under which such communities emerge and govern themselves. Examining three key terrains – decentralised and federated environments, independent hosted platforms, and enclaves within Big Social – we argue that cosy communities are not merely nostalgic retreats, but emergent counter-infrastructures that relocate governance from opaque platform systems to situated human judgement. The ‘cosy-turn’, we contend, represents a politics of maintenance and a reassertion of community as a governable social form within and against platform capitalism.
This article examines how publics on the margins of India's media landscape engage in digital news communication. Focusing on Northeast India, a region historically peripheral to national politics and journalism, it analyses audience interaction with regional digital-native news outlets on Facebook. Drawing on Dahlgren's interactional model of the public sphere, Keane's micro-public sphere, and recent work on affective and infrastructural publics, the study explores how emotion, reasoning, and mediated visibility intersect in peripheral contexts. Using a mixed-methods design that combines descriptive analysis of participation trends with qualitative interpretation of reader interaction, it identifies hybrid patterns of expressive and deliberative engagement. Although overall participation remains low, comment threads reveal meaningful civic presence within constrained digital infrastructures. By situating engagement from India's Northeast within debates on platform governance and media peripheries, the paper extends public sphere theory to show how small-scale digital participation contributes to everyday democratic discourse.
To suggest that, for those influenced by his work, Graeme modeled the critical conscience of cultural studies is to highlight these key themes in his approach: the relation of theory to meaningful practice, an abiding concern with the power relations that shape everyday life, the intellectual, ethical-moral, and civic role of higher education, and, above all, a contribution to the public good. His contributions are monumental and remain an inspiration to those who share his version of cultural studies and its commitments. There is much work still to do, but we are all better off-and profoundly grateful-for having been fortunate enough to share the place with him for a while.
This paper examines the affordances of Australian television sketch comedy of the 1980s and 1990s through a case study of one of its leading examples, Fast Forward . We argue that the show exemplified a fertile three-way relationship between democratic nationalism, broadcast media and comedy as an artform. First, we situate the ‘high broadcast moment’ as a historically specific media ecology of shared address. Second, we reconstruct the commissioning context and industrial environment that made a prime-time, nationally scaled sketch format both possible and valuable. Third, we analyse how Fast Forward used parody and satire to convert political strain into collectively intelligible recognition, allowing tensions to be contained within a civic national frame. Finally, we use the example to raise questions about comedy in the post-broadcast environment, where it is more difficult to identify durable spaces of shared address in which disagreement remains intelligible as part of a common conversation.
This article surveys Graeme Turner's research contributions to media and communication studies since the 1990s, and his intellectual and pedagogical leadership in the field in Australia and beyond. It considers his work in critical industry studies, as well as his interest in the nation, and his views on issues including technology and the creative industries.
Australian screen storytelling is in a state of crisis. Culturally relevant stories that reflect the sensibility of Australians are disappearing from our television and cinema screens and rarely appear on the streamers. This has occurred while government ministers proclaim Australian stories are essential to well-being, social cohesion, and nation-building. In this article we argue that underlying the quantitative drop in Australian drama is a more fundamental problem: the capacity of Australian screenwriters to imagine culturally relevant stories. The origins of this lie in the internationalisation of screen industry policy, the programs and priorities of screen funding agencies, and the dominance of the Hollywood narrative paradigm in the training of screenwriters in higher education. Together, these influences have systematically eroded ‘Australianness’ in screenwriting. This article calls for research into policy frameworks and training to ensure a better place for Australian voices in education, screen development and production in future.
This study examines how affective governance operates on AI-mediated mental health platforms through a case study of Xin Dao Diary, a Chinese app combining emotional self-tracking, peer support, and AI “animal therapists.” Affective governance involves the strategic modulation of users’ emotions through design, algorithms, and rules. While existing literature often treats this as a unidirectional and structurally determined process, we argue it is highly dynamic. We propose the concept of contingent affective governance to capture how these strategies emerge, adapt, and occasionally backfire through continuous feedback loops between platform mechanisms and user emotions. Methodologically, we combine a walkthrough analysis to trace intended governance logics with a diary study and an examination of user-generated content to reveal everyday negotiations, resistance, and public contestation. Our analysis identifies three core platform mechanisms: normalized expressive design, algorithmic empathy matching, and gamified limits and incentives. On the user side, three key dynamics emerge: co-constructive care, autonomy in resistance, and public contestation. These findings demonstrate how the app extracts emotional data while facilitating perceived therapeutic benefits, producing differentiated, and provisional forms of biopolitical control. The article reframes affective governance as an evolving process of mutual shaping between platforms and users.
