By Anthony Morgan, Timothy Cubitt, Alexandra Voce and Isabella Voce  

We conducted a randomised survey experiment involving 13,301 online Australians. Respondents were asked about their support for environmental, anti-lockdown and sovereign citizen protests. They were randomly allocated to one of three groups presented with different protest tactics—peaceful marching, disrupting traffic and violent clashes with police. Respondents were significantly more likely to oppose violent or disruptive protests than peaceful protests, regardless of the issue or movement in question. The strongest opposition was to anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination protests, followed by protests relating to the sovereign citizen movement. Protests about environmental issues had the most support. The effect of conspiratorial beliefs on support for protests varied by protest cause. Belief in conspiracy theories increased support for protest violence, relative to other tactics. Support for certain protest causes and tactics is shaped by a person’s ideological beliefs.

Trends & issues in crime and criminal justice no. 702. Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 2024. 23p.

By Sarah J. Jackson

Shifting understandings and ongoing conversations about race, celebrity, and protest in the twenty-first century call for a closer examination of the evolution of dissent by black celebrities and their reception in the public sphere. This book focuses on the way the mainstream and black press have covered cases of controversial political dissent by African American celebrities from Paul Robeson to Kanye West. Jackson considers the following questions: 1) What unique agency is available to celebrities with racialized identities to present critiques of American culture? 2) How have journalists in both the mainstream and black press limited or facilitated this agency through framing? What does this say about the varying role of journalism in American racial politics? 3) How have framing trends regarding these figures shifted from the mid-twentieth century to the twenty-first century? Through a series of case studies that also includes Eartha Kitt, Sister Souljah, and Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, Jackson illustrates the shifting public narratives and historical moments that both limit and enable African American celebrities in the wake of making public politicized statements that critique the accepted racial, economic, and military systems in the United States.

New York; London: Routledge, 2014. 218p.