"Exploding Media Myths : Misrepresenting Australia?" - Forum

Their fear - Our Fear

Anne Aly — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:36:28 PST

Media, 9/11 and Fear: A National Survey of Australian Community Responses to Images of Terror.

Mark Balnaves et al. — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 22:08:21 PST

The history, politics, and psychology of fear have had extensive press since the attack on the World Trade Center in New York by AI-Qaeda terrorists. Fear of any kind, as Robin (2002) points out, has the potential to reinforce unequal power relations. Identifying and exposing fear and its consequences, empirically as well as politically, is essential to the democratic state, just as exposing bullies is essential to a safe schooling environment. Interestingly, however, there have been few measures of fear, for policy purposes, and explorations into exactly how afraid communities might have become after 9/7 7. In this paper, the authors report on a national survey of fear in Australia and how communities have reacted to terrorism messages.

Veiled Threats: Recurrent Cultural Anxieties in Australia

Anne Aly et al. — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 21:41:39 PST

At the end of the nineteenth century, white Australians found themselves in a turbulent and rapidly changing world. As British settlers in a vast, often-perplexing and under-populated continent, they were increasingly aware that they lived in a crowded and predominantly Asian neighbourhood. Their supposedly empty spaces seemed to invite the unwanted attention of hostile outsiders, fertile soil for speculation about vulnerable borders, invasion and violation. It was commonplace of the period for white females to be considered at once particularly vulnerable and also innocent symbols of the new nation. They needed to be protected against Asian males allegedly bent on conquest and violation. It does not follow that these “invasion narratives”, however persistent, meant that the entire population was disabled by fear and dread, but there is convincing evidence of a deeply embedded cultural anxiety about the destructive possibilities and hostile intentions of Asian outsiders. In this article, the authors examine recent representations of Muslims as hostile outsiders in Australia, focusing in particular on the veil as a marker of female oppression under Islam and a sign of the threat attributed to the Islamic community in Australia. While it would be misleading to propose a simple line of progression from late nineteenth century apprehensions to those a century or more later, there are nonetheless intriguing parallels and recurrent expressions of survivalist anxiety across the period examined in this article.

Australian Muslim Responses to the Discourse on Terrorism in the Australian Popular Media

Anne Aly — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 18:18:31 PST

The media is often referred to as a social institution in that it is a major element of contemporary Western society. Through the media, social processes create narratives or stories within interpretative frameworks that are embedded in the cultural and political assumptions of the wider society. Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, the media has played a crucial role in the developing discourse on contemporary terrorism. In the Australian context, this discourse has emerged as one which implicates Australian Muslims, constructing them as a homogenous monolith with an underlying implication that Islam, and by association Australian Muslims, is secular resistant and at odds with the values of the liberal democratic state. Several textual analyses attest to the bias against Muslims in the popular Australian media discourse. However, there have been no studies into how Australian Muslims are interpreting and responding to this discourse. Based on research into the attitudes and perceptions of the media among Australian Muslims, this paper argues that the interpretation of the media discourse as defiantly anti-Muslim and the perception of the media as a powerful purveyor of public opinion has impacted on the construction of Australian Muslim identity. In responding to this discourse, Australian Muslims are creating new narratives of belonging which either reinforce or reject the underlying messages that situate them outside mainstream Australia.

“They want us to be Afraid” Developing a Metric for the Fear of Terrorism

Anne Aly et al. — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:58:51 PST

There is a range of scales to measure different psychological and behavioural responses in the research literature. However, there is no summative measure for community fear. In this paper the authors report on a major national survey of Australian Muslims and the broader community that creates a metric, or barometer, to measure fear among communities in Australia after 9/11. The paper will also report on major qualitative research investigating community responses to the media and political discourses on terrorism and fear. These quantitative and qualitative data provide a picture Australian Muslim communities under siege. The findings reported in the paper are a part of an Australian Research Council (ARC) project on the responses of Muslim communities to media reporting on terror.

Shifting Positions to the Media Discourse on Terrorism: Critical Points in Audience Members' Meaning-making Experiences

Anne Aly — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:27:03 PST

In his essay on encoding/decoding, Hall (1980) acknowledges that events in the broader socio-political context influence the way audiences position themselves in relation to the dominant hegemonic discourse. This article reports on an investigation into how Australian audience members continuously reviewed and shifted their positions to media texts that contributed to an over-arching evolving and changing discourse of terrorism in the Australian popular media. The findings of the study illuminate critical points in meaning-making in relation to the evolving discourse on terrorism. These critical points are not single moments, but rather a series of determinate moments where messages are decoded, subsumed into the range of cultural codes and discourses available to the audience, which are then implicated in the decoding of other messages, and then also subsumed into the cultural codes of the audience.

Social Implications of Fearing Terrorism. A report on Australian responses to the images

Anne Aly et al. — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:01:17 PST

On 20 November 2008, 29 participants came together for the Exploding Media Myths: Misrepresenting Australia Forum at the University of NSW in Sydney. The Forum was designed to bring together keynote speakers, academics, policy makers, the media and community to discuss the findings of an Australian Research Council Discovery Project, Australian Responses to the Images and Discourses of Terrorism and the Other: Establishing a Metric of Fear. Over the course of the day, the participants discussed a range of themes relevant to the media and its representation of Australia and Australian values in the context of increased incidences of vilification against Australian Muslims; a policy focus on social inclusion, citizenship and adherence to Australian values, and heightened levels of fear and anxiety about the state of security and infringements on civil liberties in a post 9/11 world.