ANZCA08 Conference - Day 3

I am at Day 3 of the ANZCA Conference, "Power and Place" at the Duxton Hotel in Wellington, New Zealand. Keynote presentation today is by Nicky Hager on "'Communication' and Information that does not inform: Understanding Techniques of Political Manipulation".

Nicky Hager is an investigative journalist who has broken several key stories about the manipulation of political power and spin campaigns by public relations agencies around issues such as logging. He is the author of The Hollow Men, which was available at the conference. This book led to the fall of Don Brash as the leader of New Zealand's National Party.

The other main activity for me today is announcing the ANZCA09 conference to be held at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, at the Creative Industries Precinct at Kelvin Grove. No web site as yet, but I did set up a Facebook page this morning.

ANZCA Conference - Day 2

Day 2 of ANZCA at the slightly warming up Wellington. As a member of the ANZCA Executive, and Vice-President-elect (which means hosting the conference at QUT in Brisbane next year), I have spent a lot of time in Executive meetings dealing with Constitutional changes. What fun! As I wryly observed, the Weimar Constitution of 1919 was considered the leading constitutional document of its time, yet didn't stop Hitler from coming to power in Germany 14 years later.

The keynote speaker was Professor Jennifer Craik, my PhD supervisor when at Griffith, and her presentation was titled "The Empresses' New Clothes: Dressing Women for Politics". I'm afraid to say it, but I was disappointed by Jenni's talk. It relied too much on the entertaining nature of the visuals, and the perceived frivolity of public discourse about women, power and fashion, ad in my view didn't engage with the material at a deeper level. I know that Jenni's work can do this - I just felt that the paper presented was a bit too easy to play to the punters and not intellectually tax people too much.

I caught a very good paper by Jim McNamara from the Australian Centre for Public Communication at UTS in Sydney, who did a study with his students of e-electioneering in the 2007 Australian Federal election. A lot of good stuff in this, and the report can be downloaded here.

ANZCA08 Conference - Power and Place, Wellington, NZ

I am in wintry Wellington in New Zealand for the Australia and New Zealand Communications Association (ANZCA) conference for 2008.

The theme of the conference is "Power and Place", and the keynote presentation this morning was by Maxwell McCombs, the pioneer of agenda-setting research. He was presenting a 40-year retrospective of the "Chapel Hill studies", as they are known, of agenda-setting in relation to the 1968 US Presidential elections.

One point that McCombs emphasised was that agenda-setting methodologies have been moving beyond the news/politics/public affairs nexus. He pointed out a study (missed author) that showed how agenda-setting research illustrates the rise of the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA) from a relatively minor group in the late 60s to its multi-billion $ status today. It is also being used to evaluate corporate reputations, as is occurring with the Reputation Institute in The Netherlands.

Forthcoming events

I have now returned to U. Indiana - Bloomington after the International Communications Association conference in Montreal.

Forthcoming events that I will be attending include:

• Creating Value- Between Commerce and Commons - 25-27 June 2008, Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre, Brisbane, Australia. This conference is being hosted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation.
• Power and Place, the Australia and New Zealand Communications Association Conference - 9-11 July 2008, being held at the Duxton Hotel, Wellington, New Zealand, and being hosted by Massey University.
  

For those planning ahead for 2009, a series of important event will be happening in Australia in July. I will be organising the 2009 ANZCA Conference in Brisbane, which provisionally has the dates of 8-11 July and will be at the Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove. The working title is "Communication, Creativity and Global Citizenship".

This will coincide with:

• 2009 Oxford Internet Institute Summer Doctoral Program to be held at QUT in Brisbane from 5-18 July. The contact for OII 2009 (which will be in Winter rather than summer in the Southern Hemisphere) is Dr. Marcus Foth.
  
• 2009 ICA Regional Conference to be held in Melbourne from July 16-17. The conference will be titled Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalization and National Identity, and the contact is Professor Ingrid Volkmer. A call for abstracts will be issued shortly.
  

The combination of events should lead to an attractive group of speakers coming from outside of Australia and New Zealand in July of next year.