I’ve stepped in as the presenter of the second paper in this opening session at the P³: Power, Propaganda, Polarisation ICA 2024 postconference [8] – unfortunately my colleague Katharina Esau, who was meant to present today, has fallen ill. The work we are presenting here is one of the early conceptual outcomes of my current Australian Laureate Fellowship on partisanship and polarisation, and both explores the concept of polarisation as current literature from a variety of fields describes it, and outlines five key symptoms of what we define as destructive polarisation that require further scholarly attention and empirical analysis.

The slides for the paper are above, and a pre-print article which addresses these concepts in much more detail [11] is also available already.