Policing radicalisation: The role of community engagement police in counter-radicalisation measures

Sarah Rubinshtein - School of Social Sciences

The United Nations argue that constant research must be done to counter the ever-evolving threat of radicalisation, by identifying key factors for each member state. The current best-practise for counter-radicalisation is a community engagement policing model, which involves building rapport and trust with communities and other key stakeholders. However, evidence suggests that most research on policing focusses on reaffirming current police practices. This is especially true when it comes to counter-radicalisation, where current practices tend to over-police at-risk populations. Why does this discrepancy happen? What are community engagement police in South Australia tasked to do, and how does this actually play out in real life? Furthermore, how does the role of the internet and technology become integrated into this process, from a community standpoint? This research aims to investigate these questions, and more, from a critical thematic analysis perspective.

Sarah is a PhD Candidate at the University of Adelaide. She holds a Bachelor of Criminology (Honours) from the University of Adelaide, where she completed an Internship with the Adelaide Cybercrime Laboratory. Sarah's special interest area is hate crime, and her current research involves looking at community policing in counter-radicalisation.

The role of job stressors for content moderators: A survey study

Ishi Jamdagni - School of Psychology

Using social media has become a part of everyday life and the user-generated content represents the full spectrum of human experience- from the mundane to the extremely violent. Thus, the user-generated content on social media platforms is filtered by AI-generated algorithms however, due to the complexity of decision making involved in this process a lot of moderation is done by humans called content moderators. The seriousness or intensity of the mental health concerns that content moderators experience has not been widely or systematically studied, with a handful of interview and survey studies appearing in the last 12 months. In my talk, I will discuss to the two broad aims of my study; to understand the job role demands and stress experienced by content moderators; (2) to identify the sources of stress for content moderators.

Ishi is currently in her first year pursuing PhD under the supervision of A/Prof Carolyn Semmler. Ishi completed her Bachelor of Arts (Psychology) from the University of Melbourne and a Bachelor of Psychological Sciences Honours from the University of Adelaide. She has prior research experience from volunteering as a research assistant at the University of Melbourne and with an independent Indian researcher.

Normalisation of chance-based mobile games for children

Dr Wiliam Machado de Andrade - School of Humanities

The mobile gaming industry has exponentially grown along with pervasive smart technologies and portable handheld devices. With the highest earnings in the video game industry, mobile games rely on novel monetisation approaches and diverse audiences, exploring non or lightly regulated markets. Some financial strategies rely on chance-based mechanisms, which resemble gambling techniques. Products aimed at children may have storylines that do not present gambling with real-world money but work towards normalising it, preparing gamers for its practice by using surprise items whose content can only be revealed upon some sort of payment, fragmenting the notion of value and risk.

Dr Wiliam Andrade researches the mobile gaming phenomenon, quantifying normalisation traces in products labelled as suitable for children and categorising how narrative forms of chance-based mechanisms manifest in games. In this talk, he will discuss the rating system scenarios and how producers avoid current legislation to explore digital products for children in their early ages.

Wiliam is a lecturer at The University of Adelaide working with 3d graphics and animation. He is also the coordinator of Narrative and Games, which combines his media background with his life as a gamer.