The final speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Sebastian Svegaard, shifting our focus to Taylor Swift fandom on Reddit. The first Swiftie subreddit was created in 2010, but such fandom has evolved and diversified considerably over the years; several new subreddits emerged especially in 2023 in response to Swift’s romance with NFL star Travis Kelce. The present paper examines this for a period from September 2023 to October 2024.

/r/TaylorSwift remains the largest of these subreddits, but the anti-fandom subreddit /r/travisandtaylor was particularly active as the romance intensified in mid-2024. A smaller group …

The next speaker in this session at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, whose focus is on the manosphere on Reddit, with a particular focus on the gamergate controversy. This phenomenon has in part been studied from the perspective of radicalisation, but this is problematic: the focus of radicalisation studies is often driven by an anti-terrorism law enforcement agenda and centres the state and its institutions while othering religious and ethnic groups, rather than emphasising human experience.

A different way of approaching radicalisation is via counterpublics theory: such counterpublics are often defined in relation to …

I was the next speaker in this session at the IAMCR 2025 conference in Singapore, presenting work in progress in our effort to use the practice mapping approach for the analysis of discursive alliances in climate change debates on Facebook in Australia.

Slides are below, though you’d really want to download the full Powerpoint in order to see the animated video of the dynamic practice mapping towards the end.