Volume 20 editorials
Editorial
Hart Cohen, Western Sydney University
Welcome to the 2025 issue of GMJ/AU. This issue is, in part, the culmination of collaborations between the IAMCR and WSU’s ICS featuring the work developed for a pre-conference held at WSU in late 2024. An IAMCR pre-conference is a significant commitment made by the IAMCR to both the University and specifically the ICS. Dr Valentina Bau who works in ICS and who is a mainstay of Participatory Communication Section of the IAMCR, drove the pre-conference link to the IAMCR and as a member of the ICS was able to host the pre-conference as a ICS function. We thank also Bruce Girard immediate past president of the IAMCR.
Professor Juan Francisco Salazar, current interim of ICS, attended and introduced the pre-conference. Juan offers perspectives on the pre-conference (see below) which he addressed at the time.
This issue features scholarship whose intentions have several points of contact but whose approaches and engagements are quite different:
Nico Carpentier offers a reprint of a 2019 article that was part of the theme “Rescuing Participation” for the Portuguese Journal Comunicação e Sociedade. Here the idea of “participation” refers to the focus on Participatory Communication as a feature of critical media studies especially of the 21st century. The article addresses a massive shift in the thinking about participation especially considering Internet-based corporatisation which turned away from the Berners-Lee vision of an Internet of participatory communication free of propriety controls. With Internet 2.0, the rise of social media is now notorious for its dominance by algorithmic over-determination of preferred meanings laid down by the hegemony of big tech. Against this trend, the article focusses on three points of resistance: “…the delineation of participation, the emphasis on participation (and democracy) as ethical, and the specification of the societal benefits of participation…” This is an important push back against the populist and illiberal (see Bakardjieva below) forces now rising from MAGA in the USA to the regimes of Hungary and rising right wing movements in the UK, France and Germany. To the authors, this is even more reason to re-iterate a participatory ethos as both a means of restoring democratic forms of political action and countering the emergent dominant regimes that work at de-legitimatising participation and in this way weakens democracy itself.
Maria Bakardjieva’s contribution, Tracing Illiberalism in the Civic Grassroots works with the idea of “Illiberalism” as expressed by three grassroots organisations in Bulgaria. This research suggests that illiberal ideas circulate through everyday experiences of work, consumption of goods and services, and everyday life/social interaction taking the analysis beyond media. With case studies of the Levski fan group, the Shipka Bulgarian National Movement and the Revival party / movement new grounds for rethinking the basis for illiberalism and populism are offered. Among Eastern European countries, we tend not to hear much about political goings-on in Bulgaria – we read more about Hungary or even Romania since the war in Ukraine has come to dominate the media landscape. In the context of neoliberalism, illiberal politics in Bulgaria resembles the MAGA phenomena on a mini scale with the similar kind of erosion of a democratic ethos and economic deprivation for the most vulnerable. The blame-shift of illiberal politicos onto liberal policy for the economic hardships caused by neoliberal market-based financial harm is an especially cruel twist for those in Bulgaria who have most to lose within these political machinations.
In Intersubjective Fiction for adaptive peace building: Emergence of a third space aesthetic, Cymbeline Buhler King argues that participatory arts are increasingly recognised for their capacity to support grassroots peacebuilding strategies. Importantly they focus on engagement and dialogue where artistic processes and collaboration engages with transitional justice. King uses intersubjective fiction; a participatory art form she developed through which community collaborations can address complex challenges such as post-war peacebuilding. Working with participants in the Theatre of Friendship, a long running peacebuilding network in Sri Lanka, this research develops a junior fiction novel that speaks indirectly to future generations through a fiction-generated third space aesthetic. This created a meaningful channel through which participants could directly and dialogically explore the challenge of how they want their country to move towards sustainable peace.
In OUR RAT KING xdd: The role of emote-humour in constructing cross-platform communities online, Geoff Lee and Ryan Stanton explore the role of emote-humour in constructing cross-platform communities online specifically on the streaming platform, Twitch. Emotes on Twitch are a key part of how users produce humour, remixing and creating new emotes based on the content of live streams. These emotes are subsequently adopted by live streamers into recurring jokes made during their own broadcasts, encouraging their viewers to develop unique responses that become enshrined as memetic practices. This article analyses how the collaboration between live streamers and their viewers facilitated by these emotes enables the co-creation of a strong community identity. Studying the processes by which this emote-humour spreads on and beyond Twitch therefore reveals how platform tools are being used to foster a novel form of multimodal, collaborative cultural production that is increasingly being incorporated into how communities communicate with and identify each other both on and across various platforms.
Postgraduate Papers
In ‘The development and semantic change of noun-noun compounds in Mandarin Chinese: A corpus-based analysis’, Jane Chanell examines the development and semantic change of noun-noun compounds in Mandarin Chinese, addressing a historically underexplored aspect of diachronic semantics and morphology. The findings are contextualised within key features of the Chinese language, including its simplified syllable structure, high homonymy, and logographic script, all of which shape the trajectory of semantic change. This research offers new insights into the development of Mandarin compound words, contributing to a broader understanding of historical semantics, morphological processes, and lexical change in Chinese.
In Conceptual disruption of artificial intelligence image generators within the creative process, Joshua Honeyman examines the ways in which artificial intelligence (AI) image generators disrupt how images are created and viewed. The paper examines and categorises types of AI hallucinations using a surrealist inspired dream matrix, within the notion of ungroundedness, and through an understanding of visual rhetoric. Finally, AI image generators are explored as source material in the process of creating handmade images. Through this analysis, an understanding of the disruption and creativity in the context of artificial intelligence with human imagination can emerge.
ESSAY
Philip Sheldon explores Marshall McLuhan’s analysis of post war American advertising through a critical examination of his book, The Mechanical Bride (1951). Written in advance of the eventual boom in a semiotics of popular culture in the 1960s, The Mechanical Bride exemplified what would become McLuhan’s trademark criticism of media – a sardonic wit combined with his Cambridge education and erudite grounding in the trivium – grammar, logic and rhetoric and tuition under I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis. Sheldon, however, argues that McLuhan failed to understand the basics of advertising. In addition, Sheldon claims that McLuhan underestimates the audience’s intellect, lacks a sense of the broader cultural context and post-war consumer moment where consumption and nation building were socially and symbiotically connected.
NOTE:
GMJ/AU was taken offline for over one year in order to re-build the site within an new platform. We are pleased to be back online with the 2025 issue albeit over 1 year late. We thanks our authors for their patience during this period.
GMJ/AU through its editors recently attended a meeting by invitation of the editors of the German GMJ edition in Berlin. A collaborative issue involving the current network members of GMJ is in the planning works.
Hart Cohen, Managing Editor, GMJ/AU
Myra Gurney, Editor, GMJ/AU
Guest editorial
Professor Juan Francisco Salazar
I would like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we are meeting: the land of the Barramatigal clan of the Dharug nation. I acknowledge elders past, present and emerging of what is and always will be Aboriginal land. To those of you who are passing through from other nations, we welcome you and wish you well.
I would like to offer a huge thank you to Dr Valentina Bau for organizing this excellent event and inviting me to say a few words. I would also like to acknowledge our colleague, Professor Hart Cohen, who like Valentina, has been a long-standing member of IAMCR and who assisted in the organisation of this event but couldn’t be here with us today. Thanks also to Professor Nico Carpentier, for your support, your generosity with your time, and your ‘participation’ and engagement today.
I think it is appropriate that we pay tribute to Julian Assange who came back to Australia as a free man last night, after a 12-year ordeal of exile and imprisonment. *
My first IAMCR conference was 20 years ago in 2004 in Porto Alegre and my last one was in Cartagena in 2017. I do think it is one of the best of the larger Communication and Media conferences with an international profile and one that has engaged extensively with the Global South.
So, it’s an honour for us at Western Sydney to host this pre-conference event in collaboration with the IAMCR and especially thank Bruce Girard, IAMCR President for facilitating this arrangement.
In the many IAMCR conferences between 2004 and 2017, I was one of the coordinators of the Our Media / Red Nuestros Medios network which emerged as a spinoff to the IAMCR conference in Washington DC from 2000 onwards** and which was among the first networks of academics, practitioners and activists to come together to pioneer horizontal debates in alternative, community and activist media, including questions of Communication as co-creation / Engaged Media Practice which is the topic of today’s meeting. I mention this because it is interesting that 25 years later, we are still grappling with many of the same questions. Why is this so? In part it is because these questions are not static or monolithic but are continually being contested and redefined as the contexts of their expediency also changes.
My work for over a decade during the late 2000s was on Indigenous Media in Latin America. In the service of this interest, I worked across what was termed, “engaged media research” with several First Nations organisations and activists. I only mention this because now 20 years later IAMCR is devoting the theme of this year’s conference in Aotearoa (New Zealand) to this field of First Nations under the rubric of “Weaving People Together”. It is an excellent choice to have Distinguished Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith as the keynote presenter at the opening plenary this Sunday in Otautahi / Christchurch. My PhD work in the early 2000s on Indigenous Communication Rights in Chile was grounded on her pioneering work.
In relation to the first session, Language and Discourse in Collaborative Expression, it is worth noting that weaving is not only a practice of making, a material semiotic form of collaborative expression, but also a concept that comes from First Nations knowledges and practices. I first heard of this concept from Nasa elders and activists, Indigenous people in the Cauca Valley, in Colombia in 2004 as El Tejido de la Comunicación or the fabric of communication.
This concept of a woven fabric is a powerful way to see research and media practices.
I am pleased to acknowledge the importance in an event like this, how across time and space, concepts and practices emerge, circulate and are mobilised; how they are theorised and put into practice; how they keep being defined and redefined.
Another key concept for this year’s conference and for the IAMCR is participation. As we have a world expert here with us in Prof Nico Carpentier who will offer a keynote on the importance of rescuing participation as a process of equal distribution of decision-making, I will skip an elaboration of this long-standing interest in Participatory Communication of the IAMCR.
But in the spirit of this rescuing effort, I would like to mention the work of Orlando Fals Borda, a wonderful Colombian sociologist, whose work on Participatory Action Research in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s is well known in some places and not known at all in others. In Fals Borda’s work, participatory action-research is a practice framed by academia within the concepts of critical pedagogy, but in my understanding, it goes far beyond that. It is more a ‘life practice’, a method to address social, political and cultural struggles; a method of transformation through action and individual and collective reflection, which in most cases is misapplied, taking away its transformative edge and its critique of Western theoretical knowledge and empiricist practices. Fals Borda coined a powerful word, sentipensan or thinking-feeling as part of his philosophical-political and pedagogical thought.
OFB came across this concept of ‘sentipensar’ and a thinking-feeling research practice in his research for his book “Double History of the Coast”, published in 1982 based on conversations with fishermen from San Martín de la Loba on the Colombian-Caribbean coast. He relates the story that a fisherman related to him about the ancestral practices of "thinking with the heart and feeling with the head". So, this concept of ‘feeling-thinking’ emerges from amphibian culture, in the massive marshes of the mighty Magdalena River in Colombia. Fals Borda speaks of the turtle people, men and women who live an amphibian existence an amphibian culture a way of life in the riverside rural cultures living on land and in water.
In relation to the idea of the panel on Shared Understanding through Media Storytelling**,** Fals Borda derives a theory and a praxis of participatory research based on storytelling about the idea of amphibious research across theory and practice. Storytelling has not received enough attention I think across communication and media research.
There are common etymological roots between telling and counting: telling and recounting, telling and narrating. To define “relate” is “to tell and be together”; to relate a story is to be related to someone or some thing. To relate, is to tell a story of or give an account of; to narrate; to recount or to connect or associate, as in an ideation – a thought or to make meaning; for example, to relate theory and practice. Storytelling is a way to be counted (to be considered, to be taken into account). Storytelling can be a form of assertive decolonisation, of truth-telling.
And finally, storytelling is also a mode of participation Iin the sense of a process of equal distribution of story-making and listening.
* See Issue See GMJ/AU Volume 5 Issue 1 2011, Wikileaks: Journalism and the 21st Century Mediascape
** See GMJ/AU Volume 1, Issue 1: 2007.About the guest editors