“So, what does food have to do with media and communications?” I am talking to Alana Mann, academic in MECO (now at the University of Tasmania) and co-founder of FoodLab Sydney, about her most recent research project, and this is my burning question.

Mann tells me she gets asked this a lot and that food is everything to do with communication. “I think food has a huge communication problem because there is so much misinformation,” she says. “We’ve got to have a more democratic food system and to do that we’ve got to inform people about what’s going on.”

Mann has spent much of her career researching social movement campaigns and the politics around food. Her latest book, Food in a changing climate, addresses the relationship between food and climate change, and how hyper-consumerism and complex food chains have contributed to damaging our environment.

“Media and communications people have the skills and understanding of how you create accessible material for different audiences. I’m really interested in the power in food systems, and I’m equally interested in the power in media systems.”

MECO academics have initiated numerous multidisciplinary research projects that apply their media and communications expertise to areas as diverse as food systems, film, robotics, healthcare, urban design, e-safety, the climate emergency and political lobbying. Often these projects involve collaborations with international partners (as described in Chapter 18). In this chapter, we’ll look at some recent examples of collaborations that have relied upon domestic partnerships, such as Mann’s FoodLab Sydney, which launched in 2019 and is a joint venture between the University of Sydney, the City of Sydney, FoodLab Detroit (on which it is modelled) and TAFE NSW.

Mann co-founded the Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project through her involvement with the Sydney Environment Institute, which is a multidisciplinary institute that brings together researchers from different parts of the University. At the heart of the project is the desire to create more equitable and sustainable food systems, and to give those who are marginalised or food insecure the opportunity to become part of the food industry. Mann describes FoodLab as a “food business incubator”: in other words, an education and training program for those eager to start a career in food.

FoodLab promotes collaborations with people from all walks of life, including industry leaders, academics and City of Sydney residents. The involvement of academic researchers has enabled a focus on data collection, analysis and evaluation.

The project has so far helped more than 70 food entrepreneurs in the three years it was funded and continues to enhance the diversity of the food systems in Sydney’s inner city as an independent entity. As a director on the board of this new social enterprise, Mann hopes that FoodLab will continue to be part of the Sydney foodscape. She would also like to see the model rolled out in other local government areas and cities across Australia.

Diana Chester is a lecturer in media production at MECO and has worked on collaborative research in the area of environmental humanities and data sonification with the Sydney Environment Institute and the Sydney Nano Institute. She is director of Pandemic Vibrations, a project that explores the soundscapes of the COVID-19 pandemic and considers their impact on people’s emotional and physical wellbeing. In this project, Chester collaborated with Benjamin Carey, lecturer in composition and music technology at Sydney Conservatorium of Music, Melody Li, lecturer in animation at UNSW, and two Sydney-based musicians, Julian Bel-Bachir and Sonya Holowell, to tell a story through a mix of animation, music and sound design.

Chester tracked the journey through the pandemic from when the news first broke of the virus in Wuhan and people’s lives were upturned by daily media reports, to when the panic began to subside as vaccines became available. With funding from the City of Sydney and the Sydney Environment Institute, they recruited local students Sarnai Gan-Erdene, Saransh Agrawal and Abhimanyu Gupta, who created short pieces of animated film alongside the musical composition. Pandemic Vibrations was showcased as part of an installation at Gallery 25, ECU Galleries in Western Australia in September–October 2022.

Chester has been involved in collaborative projects since joining MECO in 2018. In 2019, they joined the Sydney Nanoscience Institute as an Early Career Research Ambassador. Later that year, they were awarded a three-year Catalyst grant for her project, Nanoresonance, which brings together scientists and scholars from creative fields to explore the possibilities and learnings from sonifying and visualising scientific data. Together with colleagues Benjamin Carey from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and Luke Hespanhol from the School of Architecture, Design and Planning, Nanoresonance has been in partnership with Nanorobotics for Health, a Grand Challenge project led by Anna Waterhouse from the Cardiovascular Medical Devices Group at the Charles Perkins Centre and Shelley Wickham from the Schools of Chemistry and Physics. It investigates the use of nanotechnology in the form of nanoscale robots that can navigate the body and diagnose early disease.

“We’re interested in the sort of knowledge that gets created through that process,” says Chester. “It’s a creative arts outcome process project where we’re developing material, and then we exhibit that work. It’s also a collaboration around what new knowledge can come from this and understanding the interdisciplinary nature of that research.” With Carey, they have set up an artist-in-residence program at the Nano Institute to support a commitment to further collaborations between art, creativity and science.

Olaf Werder is another MECO academic who has been involved in interdisciplinary collaborative projects since he started at MECO. After joining the global advisory board of the International Health Humanities Network, Werder created Health Humanities Australia, a LinkedIn-based discussion group, and formed a collaboration with colleagues at the University of Canberra. In late 2016, he was instrumental in creating a research node with the same name at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre (CPC).

The impetus for creating the Health Humanities Australia node, and including as many disciplines in health promotion research as possible, was the idea that health is everybody’s business. “This includes not just health experts and policymakers and people in labs who find solutions for medical issues, but those who are stricken by a disease or illness, those who care for them, their friends,” Werder explains. The node brings together scholars from various disciplinary backgrounds, medical and health professionals, carers and creative practitioners with the aim of incorporating arts, the humanities, and social science ideas and approaches into health and wellbeing programs. As examples, Werder highlights the benefits of music or art therapy on mental health outcomes, or how hospitals should turn to architecture to become places of rest and relaxation, rather than medical factories, to give people opportunities to heal. The development of the new research node at CPC has added MECO to the list of departments involved in the centre’s research and opened new methodological approaches for research projects and funding applications.

Having recently completed a funded research project on health and risk behaviour during travel (connected to infectious disease prevention behaviour) with members of the South Eastern Sydney Local Health District of NSW Health, Werder is commencing talks with colleagues from MECO, Health, Education and Engineering to collaborate on research projects in the Brain and Mind Centre, as well as in a cooperative research effort called Care Economy. All these collaborations show not only the inherently interdisciplinary nature of dealing with a population’s health, but the essential role media and communications plays in it.

Olga Boichak is part of another multidisciplinary partnership at the University: the Social Media and Data Science Group, which includes Tristram Alexander (Physics), Eduardo G. Altmann (Maths and Statistics), Monika Bednarek (Linguistics) and Andrew Ross (Education). Their project has received funding from the Centre for Translational Data Science to look at connections between social media and the Black Summer bushfires of 2019–20.

Using language analysis, the researchers are looking for insights into the use of social media for communication during crises and strategies for detecting and mitigating the harmful effects of disinformation and polarisation in future climate emergencies. Boichak explains that the group is looking at the impact of extreme weather events on public discourse; in this case, how, and to what extent, the Australian bushfires affected how people talk about climate change online and whether people have changed their opinion on the issue as a result.

Justine Humphry is chief investigator of “Emerging online safety issues: Co-creating social media education with young people”, a project that aims to create online tools in partnership with young people to promote the safe use of digital technologies. Boichak and Jonathon Hutchinson are co-investigators. The project is funded through the Online Safety Grants Program administered by the eSafety Commissioner.

The project began in December 2021 and will proceed in three stages. The team has conducted online focus groups and co-designed workshops with young people aged 12–17 and their parents and carers to understand emerging online safety practices, family approaches to online rules and agreements, and perspectives on changes to online privacy through new legal regulation. Humphry explains the aim is “to identify key priorities and themes and understandings of current, really pressing issues of online safety, as perceived by those groups”. The second stage will be delivering a national survey to 1,200 young people and parents. That survey will capture and delve deeper into patterns informed by priority areas identified in the focus groups, and the third stage will be producing social media education resources, which will be evaluated by students in one of MECO’s social media units.

The main goal of this project is to include young people throughout its stages, in the research, design and production of any resources created. “I’m hoping there will be an avenue for young people to get their voice out, their priorities out, on the kinds of issues for them in relation to the things that make them feel unsafe, but also the strategies they have to feel safe in an online environment,” Humphry says.

The team is achieving this through collaboration with Youth Action, NSW, a not-for-profit community advocacy network, and Student Edge, one of the largest member-based student organisations in Australia that specialises in youth research. Humphry explains that Student Edge specialises in supporting research with young people with “a large panel of over 95,000 members with access to a large pool of young people throughout NSW, a big network.”

The team’s other partner, Youth Action, NSW, has been representing young people in New South Wales for many years. The network is helping the team reach out to culturally and linguistically diverse young people, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander participants.

The team is also working with Mabel Truong, a peer participation officer employed by Youth Action to work on the project one day a week. She is a student at the University, and her role is to help reach out to and engage young people in the project.

The work is upturning researchers’ expectations. Humphry tells me, “We’re already learning a lot just from the focus groups on how much young people already know about online safety, and that in fact, the primary need for education is actually parents, not young people.”

During his time at MECO, Mitchell Hobbs has been involved in several collaborative projects that have also provided insights into the use and consequences of communication technologies. His research has focused on public lobbying strategies, social media and misinformation campaigns, and the use of dating apps.

Hobbs is currently working with colleagues from the National University of Singapore to research the use of Artificial Intelligence in strategic communication campaigns. This work focuses on how such technologies can covertly monitor and distribute messages to undermine rationality and the policy-making process in democracies. A second project currently underway focuses on public lobbying campaigns conducted by the fossil fuel industry and is a collaboration with Øyvind Ihlen from the University of Oslo.

Hobbs is also a member of the Sydney Initiative for Truth (SIFT), an interdisciplinary team that looks at the threats posed by “post-truth” phenomena such as fake news, “alternative facts” and lying. Hobbs’s recent project on the suspected astroturfing campaign for the Adani Carmichael coalmine on Twitter was funded by a grant from the Sydney Post-Truth Initiative, of which David Schlosberg from the Sydney Environment Institute is a founding member. SIFT brings together researchers in linguistics, philosophy, medicine and health, politics and international relations, media and communications, psychology, and data science.1

These projects are only a small cross-section of the numerous research collaborations that have been taking place across the department. At first glance, they may appear to be dissimilar, but communication, in its many forms and shapes, is clearly the common ground. Communication has a critical role in many of the current challenges we face: climate change and food insecurity, digital inclusion, misinformation, big data and even health outcomes.

Those involved in research at MECO have set the bar high in terms of what they can achieve. In doing so, they are pushing the boundaries of communications research and how collaborations within this area are defined.

Gerard Goggin was instrumental in establishing this standard. He was an early instigator of foundational research collaborations in the area of digital media and technology, which have left significant legacies. Goggin’s ARC Australian Research Fellowship on mobile phone culture (awarded in 2004) supported the convening of the first international conference on mobile media in 2007, with now Distinguished Professor Larissa Hjorth (RMIT). The conference created a network of national researchers, notably a number of doctoral and early career researchers who have become leading figures in this field. In 2006, Goggin and Kate Crawford received an award for their Mobile Media and Youth Culture in Australia project, which allowed Crawford to take up a prestigious ARC Postdoctoral Fellowship. Goggin also served as convenor of the Cultural Technologies node of the important ARC-funded Cultural Research Network (2004–09), which was able to support highly influential work in the Australian scene such as the Listening project on the media and cultural politics, in which Penny O’Donnell and Crawford were key participants.

Goggin brought longstanding ties to media policy and advocacy communities into play in MECO collaborations. He was a founding board member of the peak body Australia Communications Consumer Action Network (ACCAN), and served on their Grants Panel – as have various other MECO staff, such as Tim Dwyer and Fiona Martin.

Goggin, working with other colleagues at the University of Sydney (such as Dinesh Wadiwel in Sociology) forged research collaborations with disability communities, organisers and policymakers, putting MECO in the vanguard of this emerging area. In 2014, Goggin was awarded an ARC Future Fellowship on disability, digital technology, rights and accessible design, which hosted a suite of workshops, conferences and conversations with a cross-section of key players in the disability field.

According to Hobbs, academics can sometimes be at risk of falling into “groupthink”, where those within the same field develop similar frameworks of thinking. “Working with collaborators is a good way to make sure you’re looking at issues and phenomena from multiple perspectives. So there’s a resource aspect to that, but there’s also the intellectual benefits of working with other minds.”