The 2014 Hazelwood coalmine fire expelled acrid smoke over a six-week period into the community of Morwell, Australia. This study investigated community wellbeing associated with smoke exposure, demographic, social, and health factors six years post-event. Survey responses indicated participants (N = 585) were somewhat dissatisfied with community (measure: Community Wellbeing Index) and that their satisfaction with community had deteriorated since the mine fire. Multiple recent adverse life-events, somatic symptoms, and being younger were strong predictors of negative perceptions of community wellbeing. Monitoring and attending to these predictors could promote community resilience and recovery in the context of disaster.

Social media is a key platform through which communities can organise, connect and communicate. As such we argue that it can provide insight into how regional places and communities are imagined through digital platforms. Social media platforms like Facebook provide a way for researchers to map the virtual geography of real places. Often place-based community activity on social networks sites is a response to transition and change. Social media provides us with a way to assess and measure the community's response to change and crisis. This chapter will explore the ways in which digital social research methods can enhance understandings of place-based regional identities during and after times of crisis. We examine a case study from the Latrobe Valley in regional Victoria to consider how Facebook in particular provides a window to the complicated affective relationships to place that emerge in times of crisis and strife.

During and after a disaster, affected communities grapple with how to respond and make sense of the experience. The physical and mental health of individuals is often adversely affected, as is the wellbeing of the community. In early 2014, a fire in the Morwell opencut coalmine adjacent to the Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria burned for approximately 45 days, shrouding surrounding communities in smoke. As authorities struggled to put out the fire, the nearby communities became increasingly concerned about the perceived health risks of exposure to the smoke, particulate matter and gas emissions from the burning coal. The Hazelwood mine fire, initially treated as a fire emergency, 'evolved into a chronic technological disaster. and a significant and lengthy environmental and health crisis' (Government of Victoria 2014, p. 28). In response to the crisis, people turned to social media as an alternative space in which to share information, tell their stories and organise for the purpose of activism. This paper takes the Hazelwood mine fire as a case study to examine how a community used social media (specifically Facebook) during a complex technological crisis involving health effects. It examines the issues facing emergency organisations and communities in relation to information and trust, and identifies the strengths and pitfalls of social media use in relation to community empowerment and engagement.

In 2012 the Australian public witnessed three important examples of trolling play out in the public sphere that are the focus of this paper: the trolling of Julia Gillard’s Facebook page when she attempted to discuss education policy, the anonymous trolling of Charlotte Dawson’s Twitter page, and the trolling of Magda Szubanski on YouTube after she came out on The Project. These attacks may seem similar in that a public persona has been ridiculed and denigrated in flamboyant onslaughts. However, we will argue that there are important differences in the effects of these attacks, and that underpinning these are differences relating to the individual persona, the social medium and the nature of the utterance. The attacks on Gillard and Szubanski are primarily descriptive attacks on a deliberate and somewhat stage-managed public performance of identity, not a call to action. On the other hand, the anonymous trolling of Charlotte Dawson, which led directly to her attempted suicide, is clearly a performative utterance from the start, meant to have consequences on the object of attack. In Dawson’s case, the separation between her public persona and her private self is far less distinct than in the case of Gillard or Szubanski. These instances demonstrate that trolling exists on a performative continuum, engaging in constant disruption, but also lending itself to the production of social action. The kind of impact trolling will have depends, thus, on the affordances of social media, the persona under attack, and on the very nature of the utterance itself.

This paper engages with contemporary debates around the mediation of distant suffering by examining the ways in which news selection and reporting interpellate audiences into communities of feeling, in which affective belonging is structured by multimodal rhetorical strategies. Concepts drawn from discursive psychology and systemic-functional linguistics (appraisal theory) are used to show how news coverage of natural disasters positions audiences affectively. Analysis of Australian print media coverage of the 2009 Australian bushfires and the 2010 Haiti earthquake will be used to show how this process differs for local and international events. The paper contributes to debates on the "emotionalisation" of public culture by exploring the precise functions of affect within disaster reporting; in particular, how the production of various kinds of affects in the wake of a disaster shapes local and global publics.

This article discusses Australia’s participation in a Second World War postal system, the airgraph service, which used microfilm and air transport to provide a speedy and lightweight ‘photo-letter’ for correspondence throughout the British Empire during wartime. Through analysing the correspondence of one Australian serviceman and his family, consisting of letters, cables and airgraphs, we consider the specific role of the airgraph in wartime correspondence and its contribution to maintaining morale and a sense of connection to home and family for those separated by war. This article has been peer-reviewed.

Print and electronic media coverage of disasters raises a multitude of issues about the media's role during and after a crisis. This article focuses on a specific issue: the affective dimension of news media coverage immediately following a crisis. The selection and presentation of bushfire stories not only disseminates information but elicits emotion from audiences. I use textual and visual analysis of The Age newspaper's coverage of the 2009 Victorian bushfires to examine the discursive structuring of affect. Comparisons are made with coverage of earlier bushfire disasters (the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires and the 1939 Black Friday fires) in order to investigate changes in the visual and verbal discourses of bushfire reporting. The article demonstrates that there is an intensification of affect in contemporary media coverage that is not present in the coverage of previous bushfires, and that this has implications for the role of the emotions in public life and for our conception of the public sphere.

The field of media and communication studies is in the process of transforming itself, largely in response to the emergence of new domains of research – those focussing on ‘new’ media of all kinds. David Holmes (2005: x-xi) argues that the emergence of these new post-broadcast and interactive forms of communication are forcing a re-evaluation and re-invigoration of the study of both broadcast and network media ‘in terms of medium or network form rather than simply content or “text”’. Holmes claims that the field has been characterised by a split between a focus on questions of textuality, semiotics, content and representation versus questions of the ‘actual structures of communication mediums (network and broadcast)’ (2005: 5). Contrasting linguistically influenced approaches to ‘media studies’, including Marxist informed ideology critique, New Criticism, semiotics and deconstruction, with more medium-focused work of scholars such as Marshall McLuhan and Guy Debord, he argues that since the 1970s the former have dominated over the latter (2005: 5-6). With the advent of the internet, and its rapid growth in the 1990s, there is a need to refocus on the social implications of communication mediums and networks, in not only disseminating ‘representations’ but in integrating individuals into a community (Holmes, 2005: 5; cf. Carey, 1988). New media have therefore provided the impetus for a re-evaluation of the role of textually-oriented versus medium-oriented approaches.

This is a speculative paper examining the intersection between theories of affect and theories of discourse, with a particular interest in the role of experiential time. We argue that scholars who examine the relationship between discourse and affect tend to limit discourse to propositional content and the question of cognition. We take as a point of departure William James's work on the emotions and the body in order to raise questions concerning time and affect. This allows us to examine the temporality and materiality of discourse and the relationship between the utterance and experience in what we call the 'enunciative body'.

Email has become a ubiquitous mode of communication in white-collar sectors since its adoption in Australian workplaces over the last ten to fifteen years. Carolyn Marvin has suggested that ‘new’ media interact with ‘old’ media by providing “new platforms on which old groups confront one another” and that “new practices do not so much flow directly from technologies that inspire them as they are improvised out of old practices that no longer work in new settings” (1988, p.5). This paper will examine email’s place within the communications ‘ecosystem’ of the workplace. Is email converging with, displacing or co-existing with ‘old’ communications mediums? What competing or co-existing literacies and user dispositions have developed? How do users negotiate and make sense of email’s ambivalent status in relation to speech and writing? Data from a study of three workplaces will be drawn on in order to investigate the interaction between electronic, oral, written and face-toface modes of interpersonal and task-related communication.

The description link links to the ARS record describing the editorial article authored by Griffiths and Yell.