Current Projects
Place-based employment and enterprise of newly arrived young migrant women: ARC Linkage LP220100456 (2024-2027)
Media Futures Hub lead: Sukhmani Khorana
The project seeks to make use of place-based perspectives to map the workforce and business landscape of the Southwest Sydney region. It will identify the types of industry and social enterprises, potential employment and enterprise opportunities, and local organisations' capacity to work with newly arrived migrant women in the context of socio-economic recovery from the COVID19 pandemic. Using a strengths-based approach, a survey and interviews will help understand young migrant women's potential, interests, skills, and knowledge gaps in career advancement. Informed by data from the findings, the project will co-create an online career hub co-hosted with Partner Organisations which will be of long-term benefit to newly arrived communities.
Media Literacy and Political Engagement of Chinese and South Asian Migrants: Collaborative project with Dr Fan Yang (University of Melbourne) and Allies in Colour (2023-2024):
Media Futures Hub lead: Sukhmani Khorana
This project will examine how first and second-generation South Asians and Chinese (hereafter SAC) migrants who have lived in Australia for more than two years engage with political issues in Australia, what media sources and platforms they use to inform their political decisions, and what values and factors influence their political engagement and media literacy. The surveys and qualitative interviews conducted with diverse respondents from these communities will be used to determine their levels of political engagement and media literacy in Australia, as well as gain an in-depth understanding of the issues that motivate them and barriers to further engagement. The information thus gathered will be used to design 2 workshops that will act as social action interventions wherein leading community representatives and media practitioners will address misinformation and disengagement issues. The data gathered from all stages of the project will be analysed and presented in the form of a policy brief which will be of value for multicultural organisations, migrant advocacy bodies, and political bodies interested in better and more meaningful engagement with these groups on a range of socio-political issues.
ADM+S: Generative Authenticity
Media Futures Hub lead: Michael Richardson
Authenticity is a key problem for understanding and managing the impacts of generative AI and synthetic media in society, and a central target for automated decision-making systems in the information and media environment. From trustworthy news reporting to identity verification for social services and the everyday risk of scams, generative AI and synthetic media present significant real-world implications for practitioners, institutions, and publics in Australia and elsewhere. A wide range of technical solutions collectively understood as authenticity infrastructure promise to address these issues; but if adopted and embedded at scale, some of these solutions could have potentially significant downstream effects on stakeholders and implications for society.
This project will critically examine the assumptions underpinning these developments and debates, assess the technical and legal challenges associated with them, and explore novel technical responses that contribute to more responsible, ethical and inclusive ADM systems. We address these challenges in practical and experimental ways within the innovative and Generative AI Test Range environment. It will also examine what happens after any determination of authenticity, including mechanisms for explaining and communicating determinations and increasing trust in such measures.
Learn more: https://www.admscentre.org.au/generative-authenticity/
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/
RECENT Projects
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