Key Trends and Issues at the Intersection of Communication and Human Rights

Dr Ella McPherson Reflects on her Experience as ICA 2024 Theme Co-Chair

Dr Ella McPherson was delighted to serve as Co-Chair of the International Communication Association’s 74th conference theme, ‘Communication and Global Human Rights’. The 5000-member International Communication Association (ICA) convenes one of the biggest annual academic conferences on communication, and this time it was held on Australia’s Gold Coast with 2,765 attending in person and 971 remotely.

In explaining his timely choice for the 2024 theme, ICA President-Elect, Professor Silvio Waisbord, described the extensive connections between communication and human rights:

Communication […] is manifest in public debates spurred by the mobilization of “rights” movements as well as  political/cultural backlash; efforts to raise public awareness about the significance of rights, especially given violations of human rights and the tragic failure of inter-government institutions, states, and other actors to enforce rights; the evidentiary claims of human rights reporting, based on both standardized and contested communication practices; the use and critique of human rights as a discourse applied; conflicts over the balance between speech rights with other rights such as privacy and safety; debates over whether human rights is a universalist project embedded in western principles and globalist projects, or an inspiring political, moral and legal framework sensitive to difference, inclusivity, localization, and reappropriation. 

 In addition to giving a paper on ‘Methodology and Morality: Open Source Investigations and the “Bad Guys”’ for a fascinating panel on ‘Justice by Digital Open Source Research: Examining Key Issues and Challenges from Human Rights Practice’ organised by Professor Kari Anden-Papadopoulos and Professor Sandra Ristovska, Ella was on the panel for the conference’s closing keynote. 

This keynote (see photo above), addressing ‘Questions and Research Directions in Communication Studies and Global Human Rights’, covered some of the significant themes arising from the wonderful range of papers, posters and panels at ICA 2024, as well as panellists’ views on critical issues at the intersection of human rights and communication.

Ella spoke about how inspired she was by the abundance of goodwill and drive evident at ICA to understand and explain our world to make it a better place.  Key takeaways for her included how much representation and visibility matter in human rights, and how the materiality and political economy of media and technology can really shape representation – a case made brilliantly in Beyond the Straight and Narrow, a documentary screened at the conference. 

Another insight, from a panel on ‘Feminist Discourses and Counter-Discourses in the Public Sphere’ was a reminder that, though it can be distressing and difficult, we need to study those with whom we disagree.  This is not only academically driven, to more fully understand the phenomenon in question, but also politically driven, to inform those developing counter-strategies.  

Ella also stated that it would be remiss to talk about the conference highlights without mentioning the booming subfield in generative artificial intelligence research, examining genAI’s challenges on themes including digital fakery in human rights fact-finding, communicative relationships like trust between news outlets and their audiences, and our own scholarship practices.  She made the point that genAI often misaligns with – even as it eclipses – our human rights and scholarship values, and she passed along the hopeful comment she heard at a reception: generative AI is a bubble and not the future!

Throughout the days on the Gold Coast, it was clear that the conference theme was operating at a meta level as well.  Scholarship on communication and human rights is also about our human rights as scholars – our freedoms of expression, assembly, association and opinion, as well as our right to privacy.  As highlighted at the ‘Scholars at Risk’ panel, conference discussions often returned to ongoing and developing threats to these rights, and Ella expressed the hope that ICA can continue be a network to witness our struggles and to protect our rights, as well as to dialogue with practitioners facing the same challenges.

In the plenary conversation, Ella also highlighted several critical issues and future research directions arising at the intersection of human rights and communication.  First, she argued that digital fakery creates a situation of risk governance, where the human rights world’s fears about being duped or of being seen as dupers can close it off to unknown sources for evidence, such as those without digital footprints, and to less orthodox epistemologies, such as fiction.  This has the effect of reinforcing dominant epistemologies, institutions and sources.

Second, Ella argued that the backlash bucket of concepts (which co-panelist Professor John Erni elegantly rephrased as ‘backlash studies’) will remain very useful for looking at the challenges to the status quo brought about by new actors, new data and new technologies.  This includes the concepts of knowledge controversies and moral panic, but also, as Ella has written about, visibility backlashes and epistemology backlashes.  Calling these out as discourses denaturalises them and so diminishes their potency.

Third, she reinforced the view that our rights as exercised in the digital sphere are not lesser versions.  For example, digital assembly is not slacktivism (though there are powerful people who want us to think so) but just a more mediated version of a right that, because it is a communication right, is always mediated.

Fourth, Ella said she was heartened about developing ideas around the right to disconnect or remain unconnected – whether Australia’s new legislation protecting workers from after-hours work communication or local communities opting out from being connected to tech infrastructure and the government-Big Tech nexus.  She argued that we urgently need to understand more about technology refusal and rejection – and that we need to take this refusal and rejection seriously, unlike those in the business sector and elsewhere who see refusers as markets to be captured. 

As a Centre itself at the intersection of human rights and technology, CGHR heartily welcomed the broad-ranging discussions sparked by ICA 2024’s theme.  The next ICA conference will be June 12-16^th, 2025 in Denver, Colorado, and its theme is ‘Disrupting and Consolidating Communication Research’.