Lauren O'Mahony

Human participant recruitment is often a critical part of the research process. However, this aspect of research method is often glossed over in the literature, despite being common to all research approaches involving human participants. In this study, which explored how preservice teachers view the importance of media literacy pedagogy in teaching, we surveyed and interviewed a cohort of Gen Z BEd students drawn from across three public universities in WA. Recruiting from this mythical cohort of digital natives proved onerous, and we report on the pragmatics of implementing the research design and its data collection phases. Traditional participant recruitment methods, which have been systematically employed for decades in some cases, are often unquestioned. Similarly, problem-solving skills are key to developing a researcher's sense of self-efficacy to overcome unforeseen challenges to research design plans.


We report that in the postdigital era, conventional participant recruitment methods appear to have become less effective for some cohorts of participants. Because participant recruitment often occurs in crucial early stages of a project, challenges can affect the doctoral candidate's self-efficacy and resilience. However, positivity is key, bootstraps are pulled, and agile recruitment solutions can be found.

Intersections of media, law, communication, and crime abound inthe contemporary world. And although universities tend to orga-nise media, law, communications and criminology into discretedisciplines or group them together in schools or departments, thisarticle strives to show how there is incredible merit in exploringthose intersections, not least because as the small sample of articlescontained in this special issue of Communication Research andPractice demonstrates, to do so opens up possibilities for interdisci-plinary dialogue and research opportunities. It is in that spirit thatthis article discusses, often drawing on empirical examples andcases, the ways intersections between media, law, communication,and crime play out across time and space.

Strategic sustainability communication has the potential to acculturate internal and external organisational contexts. Strategic sustainability communication could broaden societal values and social learning while building collaborative networks toward societal, environmental, and economic well-being. Arguably, internal and organisational communication is the starting point to convey and achieve an organisation’s sustainability messages and goals. Thus, this chapter takes a two-pronged approach to strategic sustainability communication from an organisational perspective. Firstly, as we argue, a necessary precondition for communication for sustainability is several considerations for sustainable employee engagement. These considerations are grounded in an approach that allows for reflectivity and encourages radical leadership thinking towards a decentralised leadership approach. Such an approach may be facilitated by the strategic communication professional as the broker of collaboration. This, arguably, contributes to the establishment of an innovation culture for curiosity-driven knowledge within an organisation. Such a culture has the potential to build a transdisciplinary response to complex problems. Secondly, these considerations for sustainable employee engagement collectively serve as enablers for communication about sustainability, addressing the sustainability issues and goals of the organisation while encouraging a desire within employees to extend these sustainability practices outside the organisation.

The Australian Romance Readers Association (ARRA), a special interest group that publicises the romance form and provides opportunities for readers to network and discuss the genre, has run a dedicated annual survey since 2009. The survey results between 2009 and 2023 illustrate the changing reading practices of respondents, especially in terms of modes of reading, preferred subgenres of romance, purchasing habits, information sources about new romances, and book formats. This article describes key survey results in terms of the changing characteristics and practices of the respondents. Key findings include that respondents generally read quickly, they read a lot, tend to always carry a romance novel, increasingly embrace eBook use, undertake most reading at home, and increasingly try a broad range of romance subgenres. The surveys provide insights into the importance of social media marketing and recommendations for readers to learn about new books. The ARRA survey data between 2009 and 2023 provides insights for writers who wish to strategically market their texts while showing some of the changing practices and trends of respondents. Overall, this paper emphasises that the romance reading respondents are highly committed, engaged and discerning in their decision-making and reading practices.

During the Second World War (1939–1945), Western Australian author Rix Weaver published her New Holland trilogy comprising Behold, New Holland! (1940), New Holland Heritage (1941) and Beyond Cooralong (1945). These novels were highly popular at the time of publication, serialised in magazines and on radio and reportedly taught in local high schools. Though published in the 1940s, these novels are of significant cultural importance because they provide a relatively rare historical depiction of the establishment and development of the Swan River colony (later known as Perth) from 1830. Even more unusual is the emphasis on the lives of women in these works. Arguably Weaver’s trilogy contains a dual narrative, one devoted to the early colonisation of Western Australia between 1830 and the 1880s while the other personalises the settlement stories through her heroines Jane Mabie and her daughter Jennifer in conjunction with their families. Through the historically grounded romantic stories of Jane and Jennifer, the experiences of women are depicted within early settler history. In this article, we read Weaver’s trilogy as “romantic historical fiction” (Teo & Fresno-Calleja, 2025) where the trilogy format calls into question the kinds of endings and closures given to their heroines. Overall, we argue that Weaver’s context while writing, the trilogy format and historical setting contribute to the individual and collective, not always happy, ending(s) of these novels.

In October 2023, an ABC Australia article by Levy and Heaton discussed the ‘gender gap’ in electric vehicle (EV) ownership, noting Australia’s similarity to the United States. where reportedly 67% of EV buyers were men and 33% were women. In Western Australia (WA), Evenergi’s 2023 survey revealed that 83% of the survey’s EV owning respondents were male. Such data suggest a noticeable gender discrepancy in EV ownership, which may be more prominent in WA. Through ten in-depth interviews with female-identifying WA-based EV owners, we sought to investigate this imbalance further, particularly why it might exist and, how it might be overcome. This paper focusses on the everyday experiences and practices of our Perth metropolitan and regionally based interviewees to shed light on potential barriers or issues associated with EV ownership such as purchase costs, driving range, charging, interactions with others about their cars, the use of technology and media coverage, including myths and misinformation. Overall, our interviewees provided insights into how they adjusted to owning and driving an EV in Western Australia, a state known for its isolation and vast distances.

Considered part of the ‘media journey’ of the UK Post Office scandal, this article focuses on ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office (Mr Bates), which dramatised the story of subpostmasters/mistresses (SPMs) wrongly convicted for theft or false accounting over a 20-year period based on flawed data derived from Fujitsu’s Horizon computer system installed by Post Office to automate accounting processes at its branches. A week after Mr Bates aired, more than a million people had signed a petition calling for justice. This article explores how and why, despite prior media attention, Mr Bates galvanised such a strong public response. It argues the composition of the television series, its structure and scheduling, its paratextual qualities and relationship to other texts, and its depiction of psychological violence, such as gaslighting, wreaked upon individual SPMs by the Post Office behemoth engaged viewers leading to significant legal change.