Update 10 December: The archive recording of Alfred Hermida’s guest lecture is now available below (DW)

As we’ve previously announced, the QUT Social Media Research Group and the Journalism, Media & Communication Discipline in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT are delighted to host a special guest lecture by internationally renowned journalism scholar Alfred Hermida today. We’ll also try to livestream the talk, from 12 noon Brisbane time (UTC+10 – that’s 1 p.m. for our less fortunate cousins in the southern states of Australia). Please tune in then – and apologies in advance if the livestream should drop out at some point (it’s an experiment).

Hashtag Dissent: #Idlenomore Aboriginal Counter Narratives on Twitter

A growing body of research points to how social media, and specifically Twitter, is emerging as a hybrid space for the cultural production of journalism, with citizens are involved in the flow, framing and interpretation of news. Studies into recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street indicate how committed individuals are appropriating social media as one of the tools to articulate a counter narrative, and contest dismissive framing by mainstream media. One such movement is Idle No More. This presentation will discuss how activists in Canada mobilised around the #Idlenomore hashtag and used Twitter to advance their message of dissent. What started as an Aboriginal protest in December 2012 developed into a loosely knit political movement. Twitter served as an alternative platform of public communication that facilitated the visibility of a marginalised social reality. The research provides insights into how engagement with networked technologies by people outside news organisations neutralise, challenge or reinforce the power of media institutions to construct social reality and how it reconfigures journalism’s role to foster a broadly informed and engaged public.

Prof Alfred Hermida is an award-winning British online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. An associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, his research on the intersection of communication technologies, journalism and the networked society has been published in Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. He is co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and is working on his new book, Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters, due to be published by Doubleday Canada. Prof Hermida is a 16-year veteran of the BBC and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997.