Discursive Australia : Refugees, Australianness, and the Australian public sphere
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2007
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies Vol. 21, no. 3 (2007), p. 347-360
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- Description: The discussion within Australia of events of the last five years, such as 9/11, the Bali Bombing, the Tampa and the Children Overboard affair, Cronulla Riots, as well as the numbers of refugees approaching Australian shores, has typically fallen into a binarized form with public discourses coalescing around calls for either 'protectivism' or 'humanitarianism' (Mummary & Road, 2003). This discursive framework has in turn instantiated an ongoing debate concerning the issue of what it means to be Australian, and who is or should be included or excluded from this national identity, questions which have been particularly contentious in recent years. This project, however, aims to unpack and analyse just one manifestatation of this debate, that carried out in letters to the editor published between 22 January and 28 February 2002 in both The Australian (Australia's national daily broadsheet) and The West Australian (Western Australia's daily broadsheet). The period chosen for this analysis is important for several reasons.
- Description: C1
- Description: 2003005400
Being Australian and the problem of detainees : Petro Georgiou and inclusivity
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2006
- Type: Text , Conference proceedings
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- Description: The plethora of public and political discourses concerned with refugees/detainees in Australia coalesced in 2005 around the private members bill introduced by Petro Georgiou (Member of Parliament for the House of Representatives affiliated with the Liberal Party of Australia) in May 2005. This bill, aimed at reforming Australia’s immigration detention policy, brought about significant changes at the legislative level (June 2005) with regard to Australia’s practices in the mandatory detention of refugees, especially the detention of children and families. These changes were also both prefaced by and led to a considerable amount of public debate in the Australian media. On this basis, 2005 has been a highly significant period with regard to the public sphere discussion of detainees, mandatory detention, and ensuing issues of national inclusivity, exclusivity, and just what it means – and takes – to be Australian. This paper thus aims to unpack part of this public discussion by analyzing letters to the editor devoted to the above issues and published in Australia’s national broadsheet The Australian between January and July 2005. In addition to outlining the major public discourses in use in these letters, this paper also flags the need for a methodology able to consider not only content but its situatedness in and implications for broader socio-political theory. Given the inextricability of such public discourses from broader social and political theories – those concerned, for instance, with identity, representation, difference, democracy, and governmentality – we use here a cross-disciplinary approach that utilises both media and discourse analysis and contemporary political and cultural theory. Consequently this paper is in two key parts. After identifying and examining the discursive positions prevalent in these letters, we then move to analyse their socio-cultural implications, unpacking just how these discursive positions function within and in terms of broader social and political theories.
- Description: 2003004499
Discursive Australia : Public discussion of refugees in the early twenty-first century
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2005
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Paper presented at the 2nd Annual Conference of the Centre for Research on Social Inclusion, Sydney : 27th - 28th September, 2004
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- Description: This paper interrogates recurring discourses in Australia’s public domain with regards to the issue of refugees and Australianness, and how they have been used to ratify notions of inclusion and exclusion with regards to what being Australian - or indeed being un-Australian - does and should mean. The unpacking of these primary discursive positions will be based on an analysis of the letters to the editor published in both The Australian (Australia’s national newspaper) and The West Australian, covering one key period from 22 January to 28 February 2002 (a period encompassing the Woomera hunger strike).
- Description: E1
- Description: 2003001231
Chewing the communal cud: Community deliberation in broadsheet letters and political blogs
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2011
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Technologies for supporting reasoning communities and collaborative decision-making: p. 296-318
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- Description: Contending that media users are more than consumers and that the mass media are able to achieve more in the public sphere than simply meet market demand, Mummery and Rodan argue in this chapter that some types of mass media may in fact fulfil public sphere responsibilities.
- Description: 2003008594
The role of blogging in public deliberation and democracy
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2013
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Discourse, Context and Media Vol. 2, no. 1 (2013), p. 22-39
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- Description: Contending that media users are more than self-interested consumers and that the public sphere media can achieve more in the public sphere than simply meet market demand, our mission in this paper is to show how some public sphere media-specifically such fora as weblogs or blogs-may in fact be able to fulfil democratic public sphere responsibilities of enabling deliberative exchange. More specifically, through a consideration of three Australian politically-focused blogs-Larvatus Prodeo (group-authored blog), Andrew Bolt (sole-authored blog by a conservative commentator), and Andrew Bartlett (sole-authored blog by a former Australian Democrats Senator)-we argue that such fora can indeed inform and enable the public sphere deliberation important for democracy. We found that although blog participants might not evidently come to rational and consensual agreements, they are debating issues of public concern, and can take part in exchanges that facilitate deliberation. In our conception, deliberation is not necessarily invalidated by either the lack of any tangible outcome, or the fact that any outcomes reached are only partial and contingent, open to revision. What is rather important is the practice and procedure of deliberation performed without stringent regulation by pre-set endpoints other than that of deliberation itself. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd.
- Description: 2003010824
Discourses of democracy in the aftermath of 9/11 and other events : Protectivism versus humanitarianism
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2003
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 17, no. 4 (2003), p. 433-442
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- Description: In responding to the events of 11 September 2001—the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington—George W. Bush announced to the world that democracy itself was under attack, and that such an attack1 represented a threat to democracy. Such an interpretation of these events, along with portraying Western democracy as a victim in need of protection and as ‘good’—and establishing thereby the moral high ground—also represented one of the main discourses in which the Tampa refugees were discussed in Australia, and has continued to be a prominent discourse in public discussion within Australia about the War on Terror, the Bali Bombings and both refugees and detention centres. Drawing on a detailed analysis of letters to the editor published in The Australian in the aftermath of 9/11, this paper seeks to show not only that discussion of the events of 2001 and 2002 has tended to coalesce around two apparently irreconcilable discourses2—that of the aforementioned desire to protect democracy or ‘our way of life’ versus that expressive of a kind of ‘globalized humanitarianism’—but that these discourses are indeed not so much irreconcilable but share a common ground along with common stakes and ends.
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- Description: 2003002849
‘Making change: Digital activism and public pressure on livestock welfare’
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie , Nolton, Marnie
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: New Media Philosophy Vol. 6, no. (2016), p.
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- Description: Legal protection of animal welfare in Australia is problematic with livestock (defined here as all animals farmed for use and profit, including poultry and aquatic animals) being effectively excluded from the majority of animal protection statutes. Such legal exclusions, joined with the inherent challenges of legal reform in this field—significant issues to do with standing, costs bearing and jurisdiction—have increased the difficulties of successful litigation. Despite explicit recognition of the necessity for reform in Australian animal law—in 2008 the Australian Law Reform Commission journal, Reform, described animal welfare and animal rights as the ‘next great social justice movement’—a number of legal strategies for reform have been summed up by the Principal Solicitor for the Pro Bono Animal Law Service (PALS), the national legal referral service for animal law operating between 2009 and 2013, as having been exhausted. Specifically, the challenges of standing and costs bearing have meant that many meritorious animal welfare matters have not been able to be pursued within the legal domain
Mediating legal reform : Animal law, livestock welfare and public pressure
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie , Ironside, Katrina , Nolton, Marnie
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference
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- Description: Legal protection of animal welfare in Australia is problematic with livestock (defined here as all animals farmed for use and profit, including poultry and aquatic animals) being effectively excluded from the majority of animal protection statutes. Such legal exclusions, joined with the inherent challenges of legal reform in this field – significant issues to do with standing, costs bearing and jurisdiction – have increased the difficulties of successful litigation. Despite explicit recognition of the necessity for reform in Australian animal law – in 2008 the Australian Law Reform Commission journal, Reform, took as its subject the ‘next great social justice movement’ of animal welfare and animal rights – a number of legal strategies for reform have been summed up by the Principal Solicitor for the Pro Bono Animal Law Service (PALS), the national legal referral service for animal law operating between 2009 and 2013, as having been exhausted. Specifically, the challenges of standing and costs bearing have meant that many meritorious animal welfare matters have not been able to be pursued within the legal domain. Alternative strategies for the achievement of legal reform in this field are thus required, and at this point in the history of the Australian animal welfare movement, one significant strategy is arguably emerging: that of strategically using social media to develop public interest in these issues and to focus this interest into effective pressure in the political, social and industry domains. This paper thus carries out an analysis of this development and focusing of pressure by animal welfare organisations through their use of social media, specifically considering a) the social media strategies utilised by such peak animal welfare bodies as Animals Australia and Voiceless, and b) the recently released Animal Effect smartphone app. More generally, this is a paper outlining and analysing the architecture of social media and public pressure being conjoined in the service of the livestock law reform movement. This paper is part of a larger project in which we record and analyse how animal welfare issues are conceived, articulated and argued within the public domain.
The 'make it possible' multimedia campaign : Generating a new 'everyday' in animal welfare
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Media International Australia Vol. , no. 153 (2014), p. 78-87
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- Description: Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Activism and digital culture in Australia
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2018
- Type: Text , Book
- Relation: Media, Culture and Communication in Asia-Pacific Societies
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- Description: Activists use digital as well as mainstream media tools to attract supporters, advertise their campaigns, and raise awareness of issues in the broader community. Activism and Digital Culture in Australia examines the use of digital tools and culture by Australian and international activist organisations to facilitate public engagement, participation and deliberation in issues and advance social change. In particular the book engages media studies, cultural studies, social theory and various ethical and political philosophical perspectives to examine the use of digital multi-platform tools by activist organisations and advocates for social change to a) disseminate information and raise public awareness; b) invoke, inform and shape public debate through the provision of information and invocation of affect; and c) garner public support (including funding) for issues and for associated social change. Engaging both qualitative and quantitative approaches, these case studies will demonstrate the richness of digital culture for activism and advocacy, examining the use by activist organisations of such digital media tools as apps, blogging, Facebook, RSS, Twitter, and YouTube. The shows that digital culture offers productive mechanisms and spaces for the reshaping of society itself to take more of a participatory role in progressing social change.
Mediation for affect : coming to care about factory-farmed animals
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2017
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Media International Australia Vol. 165, no. 1 (2017), p. 37-50
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- Description: In this article, we examine the digitalised emotional campaigning of one of Australia’s peak animal welfare body, Animals Australia, focusing on their most effective digital strategies associated with their campaigns against factory farming. Our broader interest lies with sounding out the affective affordances of the technologies informing such activist work; technologies of affect in a very significant sense. This discussion comprises three parts. First, we unpack the context for the problematic faced by animal and environmental activisms: neoliberalism, showing how neoliberal assumptions constrain such activisms to emotional appeals and denounce them for such strategising. Second, we sound out some of the affordances of digital media technologies for affectively oriented activisms; and finally, we delve into some of Animals Australia’s digital campaigning with regard to issues of factory farming in order to show the efficacy of such affectively oriented mediated strategising for the forming of new relations with factory farm. © 2017, © The Author(s) 2017.
Becoming activist : The mediation of consumers in Animals Australia’s Make it Possible campaign
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Media International Australia Vol. 172, no. 1 (2019), p. 48-60
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- Description: In 2008, the Australian Law Reform Commission journal, Reform, called out animal welfare as Australia’s ‘next great social justice movement’ in 2018; however, public mobilisation around animal welfare is still a contested issue in Australia. The question stands as to how to mobilise everyday mainstream consumers into supporting animal activism given that animal activism is presented in the public sphere as dampening the economic livelihood of Australia, with some animal activism described as ‘akin to terrorism’. The questions, then, are as follows: how to mobilise everyday mainstream consumers into supporting animal activist ideals? How to frame and communicate animal activist ideals so that they can come to inform and change the behaviour and self-understandings of mainstream consumers? This article is an investigation into the possible production and mobilisation of animal activists from mainstream consumers through the work of one digital campaign, Make it Possible. Delivered by the peak Australian animal advocacy organisation, Animals Australia, and explicitly targeting the lived experiences and conditions of animals in factory farming, Make it Possible reached nearly 12 million viewers across Australia and has directly impacted on the reported behaviour and self-understandings of over 291,000 Australians to date, as well as impacting policy decisions made by government and industry. More specifically, our interest is to engage a new materialist lens to draw out how this campaign operates to transform consumers into veg*ns (vegans/vegetarians), activists and ethical consumers who materially commit to and live revised beliefs regarding human–animal relations.
Doing animal welfare activism everyday : Questions of identity
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2016
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Continuum-Journal of Media & Cultural Studies Vol. 30, no. 4 (2016), p. 381-396
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- Description: Animals Australia focuses on making animal welfare issues visible to consumers so as to direct consumer behaviour and invoke everyday activism, an objective integral to their Make it Possible' campaign. In this paper, we primarily explore the claimed and practised identity of everyday or mainstream animal activists. This is an identity that, whilst partially and communally elaborated and affirmed online (in the online Animals Australia community), is enacted more commonly through personal and familial everyday actions such as shopping, cooking and eating than it is through such public actions as explicitly advocating or demonstrating for better welfare standards for animals involved in factory farming. A discourse analysis was conducted of 2198 posts from October 2013 to January 2014 to analyse contributors' accounts of their feelings (notably their gut reactions) and reasons for pledging, as well as to examine how contributors' accounts of their everyday practices might be understood as the development of a voice for these voiceless animals'. Overall, then, our analysis has shown supporters, participants and/or consumers who support the Make it Possible' campaign self-select into and identify themselves in terms of four overlapping frames: being vegan or vegetarian, shopping for change, personal activism and public activism and advocacy. This paper contributes to the debate concerning intersectional activism within the food activism movement.
Animals Australia and the challenges of vegan stereotyping
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: M/C Journal Vol. 22, no. 2 (2019), p.
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- Description: Negative stereotyping of alternative diets such as veganism and other plant-based diets has been common in Australia, conventionally a meat-eating culture (OECD qtd. in Ting). Indeed, meat consumption in Australia is sanctioned by the ubiquity of advertising linking meat-eating to health, vitality and nation-building, and public challenges to such plant-based diets as veganism. In addition, state, commercial enterprises, and various community groups overtly resist challenges to Australian meat-eating norms and to the intensive animal husbandry practices that underpin it. Hence activists, who may contest not simply this norm but many of the customary industry practices that comprise Australia’s meat production, have been accused of promoting a vegan agenda and even of undermining the “Australian way of life”...
The multiple modes of protesting live exports in Australia
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Journal article , Review
- Relation: Contention Vol. 7, no. 1 (2019), p. 49-65
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- Description: Signaling dissatisfaction with particular events, policies, or situations, modes of protest encompass individual expressions through to the development and mobilization of social movements. Indeed, protests can range from bodies blocking space and time to the aggregation of clicked signatures in an online petition and the sharing of campaign content through social media. All of these modes are currently employed within the Australian public sphere to bring about change or closure of the live export industry. This article analyzes the current dimensions and flows of public protest against Australia’s live export industry, examining how they are shaped not only by a myriad of organizations but also by differing modes of protest, as well as by the different modes of appeal in use by activists to mobilize the Australian public sphere in protest. Through this discussion, insight is gained into some of the capacities and efficacies of multimodal protest and its significance for both public engagement and political and industry uptake. © 2020 Journal of the Pakistan Medical Association Academic Press. All rights reserved.
Digitising kids with chooks to supercharge one online activism campaign
- Authors: Mummery, Jane , Rodan, Debbie
- Date: 2019
- Type: Text , Book chapter
- Relation: Digitising Early Childhood, Chapter 5iii, p. 319-336
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Re-branding animal activists and branding Australians: An investigation into the public relations work of Animals Australia’sactivist campaigns
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2021
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Asia Pacific Public Relations Journal Vol. 23, no. (2021), p.
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- Description: Public relations offers strategies that enable re-branding of an organisation’s poor image. As branding refers to the image an organisation (corporations, non-profits and activists) presents to its broader public, then public relations is the work of image management. This conceptual paper uses these ideas to explore and understand the work carried out by one animal activist organisation, Animals Australia, to come to inspire and mobilise a mainstream audience in animal activism. Usually examined using social movement theory, animal activists have a long history of receiving only marginal attention from mainstream audiences, and, further, from being often branded and vilified as troublemakers, extremists, fanatics who are conceived as acting against the national interest, and ignorant of the realities of life and industry. At the same time they are extolled by some in strongly positive terms due to their demands for compassion, care and assistance for those who are voiceless and unable to protest their treatment or change the circumstances of their own suffering. This paper thus examines the public relations and counter-branding work carried out by one animal advocacy organisation, Animals Australia, to re-brand itself so as to effectively address and engage mainstream Australians in its public relations campaigns for improving the welfare of livestock animals. Through a conceptual and semiotic analysis of the organisation’s investigative and campaigning work, and the way this has been constructed and framed more broadly, we demonstrate this counter-branding effort, and consider what it is making possible for the organisation and for its animal activism.
NAO Robot Test
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Journal article
- Relation: Media International Australia Vol. , no. 153 (2014), p. 78-87
- Full Text: false
- Description: Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with digital media advocacy to spread their campaign message and mobilise consumers. This article examines one attempt to mainstream animal welfare issues: Animals Australia's' 'Make It Possible' multimedia campaign. Specifically, we contend that the campaign puts into circulation an 'affective economy' (Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b) aimed at proposing and entrenching new modes of everyday behaviour. Core affective positions and their circulation in this economy are considered from three interrelated articulations of this campaign: the release of and public response to the YouTube campaign video; Coles' short-lived offering of campaign shopping bags; and public engagement in the 'My Make It Possible Story' website. Analysis also opens up broader questions concerning the relationship between online activism and everyday life, asking how articulations in one domain translate to everyday practices.
Platforms and activism : Sharing 'My Make it Possible Story' narratives
- Authors: Rodan, Debbie , Mummery, Jane
- Date: 2014
- Type: Text , Conference paper
- Relation: Australian and New Zealand Communication Association Annual Conference
- Full Text: false
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- Description: Although livestock welfare issues were once barely visible to mainstream consumers, animal welfare activists now combine traditional public media advocacy with various media platforms to spread their campaign message as widely as possible. For instance, Animals Australia’s ‘Make it Possible Campaign’ has used billboards, print media, television, radio, YouTube, Facebook, blogs, website stories, and Twitter to make livestock welfare issues visible to consumers. Such variety of platforms make it possible for animal activist groups such as Animals Australia to not only hail and mobilise consumers in a way that was not possible previously, but also to attract supporters, advertise their campaigns, and raise awareness of issues in the broader community on a grander scale than in the past. Activists activate multi-platforms as a way of promoting subsequent collective awareness and action, and bringing about both social and legal reform. The focus of this paper is on the mobilising of personal stories uploaded into the ‘My Make it Possible Story’ website. Content analysis of these stories will be overlaid with analysis of the timings of story uploading and their relation to other media activity carried out by Animals Australia will be examined. Attention will also be paid to the occurrence of what we term ‘media spikes’, where these spikes describe significant increases in public engagement with Animals Australia’s re-framing and re-posting of mainstream news items on their various websites, Facebook and Twitter. For instance, the highest number of stories posted in the ‘My Make it Possible Story’ website, on 21 October 2013 (1,065), coincides with several media spikes encompassing multiple media domains. Our examination of Animals Australia’s ‘My Make it Possible Story’ website demonstrates the kind of results activists can achieve using platforms such Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. We make the case that such activation of multiple platforms promotes engagement and participation through facilitating affective communicative investments and exchanges, a form of exchange fundamental, we argue, to the success of calls for social change and the reshaping of citizen and consumer attitudes. This paper is part of a larger project in which we record and analyse how animal welfare issues are conceived, articulated and argued within the public domain.