Outsourcing Inequality: AI procurement and data justice in Australian disability services

Media Futures Hub Lead: Georgia van Toorn

As Australia’s social service system rapidly digitalises, government agencies are increasingly turning to AI and emerging technologies to improve efficiency—especially within the disability services sector, which houses some of the country’s largest contracts with external technology vendors. Both government procurement practitioners and private vendors face the complex task of balancing demands for accountable, responsible and ethical AI with efficiency goals, while safeguarding against bias and exclusion in automated systems. Despite these challenges, little is known about how AI procurement decisions are made or their implications for people with disability.

This project uses a data justice lens to investigate how AI procurement and design processes affect social and democratic outcomes for people with disability. Through interviews with procurement professionals, technology vendors, and disability advocates, it will explore key social justice concerns including access to services, freedom from discrimination and administrative harm, and opportunities for meaningful participation in decision-making. In light of emerging government priorities for responsible AI use, the project will help build an evidence base to inform policy and practice, guiding vendors and agencies toward more just socio-technical systems that better serve people with disability.

This project is supported by a Faculty Research Grant under the ADA Seed Funding Scheme.

What Data Can’t Hear

Media Futures Hub Lead: Tanja Dreher in collaboration with Georgia Van Toorn

This project offers a novel approach to Data Justice by focusing specifically on political voice and listening, examining how datafication influences who gets to speak, be heard, and shape decisions within public institutions.  The terms political voice and political listening turn attention to questions of agency and self-determination within decision-making and institutions and are not primarily focused on auditory processes. Rather, the focus on voice and listening as a central plank of the data justice frame provokes questions as to whether and how datafied systems might be designed to provide attention, recognition and response to political voice and self-determined aspirations even, as automated decision making can create new challenges for those most impacted.

Datafied systems are claimed to offer increased opportunities to have a say, to be heard in decision making and service provision, and to be part of governance structures. In the context of neoliberalism, these platformed opportunities and incitements to speak proliferate, however this is a version of voice that matters less and less. By centring political voice, we draw attention to voice as agency, participation and influence – or voice that matters. The listening lens turns attention to processes and practices of receptivity, recognition and response to political voice, participation and agency. 

This project is supported by a Faculty Research Grant under the ADA Seed Funding Scheme.

Convict and Carceral Aesthetics

Media Futures Hub Lead: Andrew Brooks in collaboration with Astrid Lorange

Convict and Carceral Aesthetics in Australia aims to generate a rigorous study of the origins of settler aesthetics in Australia, showing that the art and poetry of unfreedom has played a crucial role in the formation of national character, systems of governance, concepts of race, and notions of common sense. Convict history has played a crucial role in structuring Australian national identity since the establishment of a penal colony on Aboriginal land in 1788. Once repressed as a shameful criminal ancestor, the convict has in the last fifty or so years been recuperated as a victim who overcame hardship to forge a liberal democracy. In this more recent guise, the convict is the archetype for a line of accidental heroes central to the national imaginary who embody continuity with, and differentiation from, British colonial rule, including the battler and the larrikin. The romanticisation of the convict in national narratives often obscures the fact that convicts were active participants in Indigenous dispossession. By showing how convictism shaped colonial Australian art, poetry, and media, and interfaced with other histories of unfreedom, this research will fundamentally change our understanding of the origins of settler Australian aesthetics. The project considers the history of the penal colony and its mutation into contemporary logics of incarceration which have seen a staggering growth in the rate of incarceration in Australia since the mid-1980s while indicators of serious crime have declined across the same period. The racialised dimension of the modern carceral apparatus has led to the over-incarceration of Indigenous people and a growing number of Indigenous deaths in custody. This project looks to trace the historical and contemporary justifications for incarceration in order to show how national identity and liberal democratic values are linked to histories of unfreedom and dispossession. The project is linked to multi-institutional research project titled ‘Convict Aesthetics in Australia: Art Histories of Unfreedom and the Poetics of Carceralism’ which brings together researchers from Melbourne University, UNSW, and Monash University. 

This project is supported by a Faculty Research Grant under the ADA Seed Funding Scheme.

ADM+S: ADM, Ecosystems and Multispecies Relationships

Media Futures Hub lead: Michael Richardson

Automated Decision-Making (ADM) has become increasingly implicated in the relationships between people and other species and ecosystems. From delivery drones to digital bioacoustics, smart farming, smart garbage trucks to conservation and computation, proliferating ADM-enabled technologies are situated within and interact in complex ways with both social and eco-systems to create new mediations between humans, technologies, animals, and environments with diverse and unexpected consequences. This project will make an innovative and transformational contribution to the advancement of knowledge about the impacts and entanglements of ADM with ecosystems and the capacity of institutions to make responsible decisions about ADM implementations, practices, and assessments.

Drawing on interdisciplinary socio-technical research practices, researchers will undertake an inclusive approach that brings together diverse knowledges, methods, and sites. In collaboration with partners and communities this project will produce the ADM+Ecosystem Playbook, a policy and practice tool kit that includes addressing the potential for an environmental impact assessment legislative, policy and standards framework for ADM in Australia. This project will intervene in the ongoing debates about ‘safe and responsible AI’ to critically examine the ecosystem impacts of ADM/AI and prioritise sustainable futures that benefit society and more-than-human ecologies alike.

Learn more: https://www.admscentre.org.au/adm-ecosystems-and-multispecies-relationships/

Listening In: improving recognition of community media to support democratic participation and wellbeing (FT140100515, 2015–2020)

Media Futures Hubs Leads: Tanja Dreher, Poppy de Souza, Diana Kreemers, and Nicola Joseph

New media forms and digital communication technologies are rapidly transforming the media landscape. The community media sector in Australia is dynamic and diverse. These parallel developments promise increasing opportunities for marginalised communities to speak up, share stories and find a voice. Yet research increasingly suggests that greater capacity for media production does not always guarantee that diverse voices will be heard.  Burgess (2006) argues, ‘The question that we ask about ‘democratic’ media participation can no longer be limited to ‘who gets to speak?’. We must also ask ‘who is heard, and to what end?’. 

This project analyses the political listening practices necessary to support the potential for voice in this changing media environment. It analyses the ways in which Indigenous and community media is heard or attended to in key institutions of the mainstream public sphere.  The project aims to contribute to community wellbeing by asking to what extent community media is heard in key mainstream institutions. Case studies examine the ways in which policymakers and journalists listen in to media produced by Indigenous, Muslim and Sudanese Australians.

Project website: https://www.listeninginproject.org/about
Final report: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/602f0029ec03a636bdba66a5/t/61e74c6385b82a133f6b6a8b/1642548338373/Project+Report+Listening+In_FINAL_211210.pdf

Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission (DP190101282, 2019-2023)

Media Futures Hub Lead: Tanja Dreher

The Breaking Silences: Media and the Child Abuse Royal Commission project analyses the role of media, journalism and social media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013-17) (RCIRCSA). 

Through an investigation into the impacts of a rapidly changing media environment on this national ‘listening’ exercise, this is the first major Australian research to explore the nexus between media and commissions of inquiry in the digital era. 

The project, which is funded through the Australian Research Council Discovery Program and is based at the University of Canberra, provides governments, journalists, victims advocacy groups, future commissions of inquiry and researchers with knowledge and tools to understand and manage the role of a rapidly transforming media environment and the public inquiry process. 

A case study approach is used to critically analyse the role of a transitioning local, national and social media in triggering, reporting on and keeping alive the findings of the royal commission, ensuring victims of institutional child sexual abuse are heard, and justice is upheld.

Project website: https://breakingsilences.net/#:~:text=The%20Breaking%20Silences%3A%20Media%20and,%2D17)%20(RCIRCSA).
Final report: https://apo.org.au/node/321304