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This paper engages with the creative strategies and media interventions of the Parragirls—a lose collective of women subject to punitive confinement and abuse as children in out-of-home "care" at the former Parramatta Girls Home—as a feminist archive of collective resistance, reclamation, and repair in the wake of institutional harm and media damage. We consider the Parragirls feminist archive in the context of a larger project analysing the role of media, journalism, and media activism in the ground-breaking Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) (RCIRCSA). Drawing on Couldry's theorisation of "media as practice," we foreground the ways Parragirls have responded to media injustice and media damage. We analyse a range of Parragirls practices and interventions which, taken together, complicate one of key media narratives which emerged during the RCIRCSA public hearings about abuses at Parramatta Girls, namely that "providing evidence, while traumatic can be beneficial and worthwhile." Our paper thus contributes to critical scholarship on news values as racialised, classed, and gendered hierarchies of attention, and to feminist media scholarship that highlights resistant and transformative alternative visions for media practice. We ask: how might we imagine, or work towards a more reparative media? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academics can engage in and contribute to activism in various ways. Some are involved in action groups on issues such as climate change and treatment of asylum seekers. Some undertake research and speak to the media about indigenous, environmental, gender and other issues. Others campaign on matters of concern within universities, including through unions and professional associations. Other possibilities include undertaking research that informs or supports activism, and advising and supporting activist students. These and other forms of academic activism can be risky. Academics who seek to combine activism with work in the university can be subject to threats, abuse, silencing tactics, and peer pressure and scholarly expectations to shift away from activism. In this paper, the authors explore these obstacles with an emphasis on strategies for avoiding the pitfalls and maintaining commitment as an activist-oriented academic. Drawing on their diverse experiences of activism, academia and community-engaged research, the authors suggest possible responses to the many pressures on activist academic work, paying particular attention to the challenges faced by early career academics. (Contains 1 table.)

This article examines news coverage of Australia's 2018 National Apology to Victims of Institutional Child Sexual Abuse to reveal how conventional news values and practices produce racialised hierarchies of media attention that routinely position whiteness at the pinnacle. Via content analysis of media coverage, informed by critical discourse analysis, we focus on whether news reporting of the Apology reflected the Royal Commission's stated commitment, care and attention to ensuring First Nations people, who were over-represented among victims and survivors of institutional child sexual abuse, were afforded voice and agency in media. The coverage was remarkable for its failure to connect the 2018 Apology to the 2008 Apology to the Stolen Generations, or to ongoing concerns regarding high rates of Indigenous child removal and over-incarceration. Overall, we argue that news values and routines work to structure media representation through logics of white supremacy and relegating colonial violence to the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (2013–17) was a highly significant legal exercise that devoted considerable expertise and resources to bearing witness and breaking silences surrounding child sexual abuse in all of its 57 case studies. In analysing the national media coverage we take a critical position to ask to what extent was this groundbreaking exercise in listening for justice reflected or amplified via mainstream news? A rich tradition of journalism and media studies contributes to the findings that routine patterns of media (in)attention produced asymmetries, with highly personalised church "scandals" drawing so much focus that they overshadowed institutional reviews and cases involving some of the most vulnerable and marginalised victims and survivors, with the effect of sidelining institutional responses designed to prevent child sexual abuse in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author explores the challenges for sexual citizenship campaigns as same-sex marriage emerges as a touchstone for progressive politics in Australia and beyond. Analysing popular media and public debate, she argues that there is much to be learned from recent critiques of liberal and colonial feminisms. Jasbir Puar argues that the ‘woman question’ is currently being supplemented or supplanted by the ‘gay question’ as a marker of a nation’s modernity, democracy and ‘civilization’. In the context of widespread support for marriage equality, an urgent challenge is how to respond to an emerging ‘homonationalism’ in public culture which positions the West on ‘the right side of history’ in contrast to homophobic Islam, and a liberal version of gay rights which obscures ongoing discrimination and injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the potential of emerging digital cultures for Indigenous participation in policy debates in the rapidly changing Australian media landscape. From the Zapatista's ‘netwar’ to the ‘hashtag activism’ of IdleNoMore, Indigenous people have pioneered innovative uses of digital media for global connectivity and contestation. Digital and social media open up unprecedented opportunities for voice, and, in theory, participation in decision-making. But there is limited understanding about how Indigenous voices are heard at times of major policy reform, and whether increased participation in digital media necessarily leads to increased democratic participation. Leading Indigenous commentators in Australia suggest an inability of governments and other influential players to listen sits at the heart of the failure of Indigenous policy. This article presents two contemporary Australian case studies that showcase Indigenous participatory media response to government policy initiatives: first, the diverse reaction in social media to the government-sponsored campaign for constitutional reform to acknowledge Australia's First Peoples, branded asRecogniseand second, the social media-driven movement #sosblakaustralia, protesting against the forced closure of remote Aboriginal communities. This article brings together theories of political participation, media change and listening to ask whether key democratic institutions, including the mainstream news media and political decision-makers, can engage with the proliferation of Indigenous voices enabled by participatory media. We argue that while the digital media environment allows diverse Indigenous voices to be represented, recent scholarship on participation and listening extends the analysis to ask which voices are heard as politics is increasingly mediatized. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]