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The afternoon session at I-POLHYS 2024 starts with Claudia Padovani, who is reflecting on the implications of political polarisation from a gender perspective. In light of persistent gender inequalities, normative perspectives may be valuable, but there is a need for further definitional work here, and there are several international initiatives and bodies that might help to address this. However, a binary approach continues to dominate, and more intersectional perspectives that connect gender with other inequalities would be useful.

There are plenty of initiatives to create change, but a full perspective on gender inequalities is still missing. Gender concerns and principles …

The final speaker in this excellent opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is the equally excellent Fabio Giglietto from the Vera.AI project, whose focus is on media political partisanship and polarisation in Italy. Especially noteworthy here is also that his project explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in news and social media research – a new approach that also needs a great deal of new validation approaches.

The project focusses on the 2022 Italian election, starting with 100,000 posts from 224 Italian news media Facebook pages. These were sampled down to some 12,600 posts on political topics from 12 …

The next speaker in this session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Ana Sofia Cardinal, and her interest is in (news) partisan sorting. This builds on digital trace data from the Web browsing practices of Internet users in several European countries and the US. This work is important given the suspected increase in political polarisation, the decrease in trust in the media, and the rise of far-right parties in several countries.

All of this is happening against the backdrop of a high-choice media environment characterised by an increasing number of partisan media; growing opportunities to personalise media diets; and greater partisan selectivity …

The next speaker in this opening session at I-POLHYS 2024 is Richard Fletcher, whose focus is in polarisation amongst news audiences. Has such polarisation increased over time, and how does it differ between news audiences in different countries? Polarisation is defined here as the behaviour of news audiences in their news choices, understood here in news outlet choices across a left-to-right political spectrum; this media system structure may also parallel the structure of the political party system, of course.

Some of this is also related to the concept of partisan selective exposure, and studies that explored whether such exposure increase …

It’s a lovely Thursday in spring in Bologna, and I’m here at the renaissance Palazzo Ercolani for the opening of the concluding symposium of the I-POLHYS project on polarisation in hybrid systems. We start with Sergio Splendore and, whose focus is on journalists’s perceptions of polarisation.

He builds here on political science definitions of polarisation as different groups moving apart towards opposite extremes, or single groups coming together around a single extreme view; but do actors in polarised systems themselves actually understand the concept that way? Other definitions of polarisation focus on the ideological and affective aspects of polarisation, and …

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Caryn Coatney, whose focus is on the data journalism of the ABC’s Digital Story Innovation team. Data journalism has evolved considerably over the past years, with the initial focus on data visualisation giving way to a broader role that in some news organisations also includes the maximising of news content engagement metrics through clickbait. Elsewhere, there is a greater focus on prosocial roles for data journalism, and a shift beyond data journalism in a narrow sense and towards more innovative digital storytelling.

Such digital storytelling made a significant difference for instance …

The next speaker at ANZCA 2023 is Sky Marsen, whose interest is in health communication during crisis. This involves matters of personal and social identity and high levels of scientific uncertainty that motivate many to look to opposing discourses from religious and other sources. The present project explored culturally diverse contexts in developing nations, and focusses here on a case study of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-16. Here, a combination of mental models and crisis communication approaches might have mitigated risks in health communication during crisis.

The project engaged in some 20 interviews with health professionals from …

The final session at ANZCA 2023 that I’m attending starts with Alex Beattie, whose interest is in news avoidance in Aotearoa. This usually refers to intentional news avoidance, but it is not always clear just how intentional such avoidance is; broader media platform choices might also have an impact on whether and how people see the news, for instance.

According to recent surveys, New Zealand has some of the highest levels of news avoidance in the world; some studies also suggest that this avoidance here and elsewhere might be a wellbeing practice. The present study explores what motivations New Zealanders …

The final speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Kirsty O’Callaghan, whose interest is in the role of gender in effective climate change communication. The important role of women at the heart of climate action has long been recognised, but climate change communication must also be multi-dimensional and involve a diversity of voices – Greta Thunberg’s success in her climate advocacy demonstrates this.

However, there still is a lack of women visible in such debates, especially also in the context of Australia and Aotearoa. Does climate change communication only work with particular audiences under specific circumstances, and what is the …

The next speaker in this ANZCA 2023 session is Victoria Fielding, whose interest is in reporting roles in climate disasters in Australia. Her focus is on the catastrophic bushfires in 2019/20, and the Lismore floods in 2022, and the way the media did or did not link these to climate change. These natural disasters were extreme, and part of a greater trend towards growing threats from climate change, and as such became part of a highly politicised debate around climate change in Australia.

While there can no longer be any question about the reality of catastrophic climate change, consensus about …