About this Event
Understanding Communicative Harm – can we measure the impact of harmful information in society?
Date: Thursday 21 November 2024
Time: 4:30pm
Location: Mahari Room, Level 7
The Fighting Harmful Online Communication initiative invites registrations from University of Melbourne researchers for the following research incubation workshop to be held at 4:30pm on Thursday 21 November.
Information may be harmful because it threatens public health, encourages or targets physical violence, seeks to mislead or malignly influence, or undermines trust in public institutions or democracy. However, our understanding of specific harms (and the mechanisms by which information produces those harms) remains underdeveloped and disagreement over the meaning of harm remains a significant hurdle to an interdisciplinary response.
The Fighting Harmful Online Communication Initiative is addressing the meaning of harm in a targeted funding scheme for University of Melbourne researchers in 2025. The scheme will support interdisciplinary research to define, explain and measure specific communicative harms or research that evaluates interventions to reduce the measurable effects of specific communicative harms. Up to $30,000 is available for successful projects.
Projects should:
A) Define or develop our understanding of harm as communication-specific and measurable construct;
B) Assess interventions to mitigate communication-specific harms with measurable consequences.
The incubator workshop on 21 November 2024 will introduce these research aims and explain how FHOC can support projects, providing access to data, advanced computational techniques, research planning and broad-spectrum, domain-specific knowledge.
It will outline the research scheme, the applicaiton process, and the criteria upon which funding will be awarded. It will also facilitate networking between researchers aimed at establishing interdisciplinary teams and provide a forum for project pitching and idea incubation.
Please note, all staff and students are welcome to develop projects but, to be eligible for funding, project teams must be led by a university staff member (contract or ongoing) and include researchers from at least two faculties. Collaborations between HASS and STEM disciplines are preferred. Preference will also be given to ECR-led projects, or to projects that include ECRs in influential roles (where ECR is interpreted as meaning level B and below).
The Fighting Harmful Online Communication Hallmark Research Initiative coordinates interdisciplinary research on the harms resulting from mistaken, misleading, exaggerated, polemic and deliberately false online communications, bringing together researchers from HASS and STEM to pursue an innovative approach to the problem.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Mahari Room, Level 7, Melbourne Connect, Parkville, Australia
AUD 0.00
