This article examines government approaches to public communications at the time of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, with a focus on how one state government body, namely, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education in Australia, has engaged with key stakeholders at a time when home–school communications has been heavily impacted by COVID-19. Through analysis of the Department’s ‘owned’ online communications platforms, such as websites, podcasts and social media, the article specifically focuses on how the Department has represented and invited engagement among its culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) stakeholders with a view to understanding the extent to which it has been able to create a sense of connection and belonging for parents and caregivers. It shares examples of positive practice by the Department as well as suggestions for further research that may help uncover best practices for multicultural and multilingual government–stakeholder engagement.

This article addresses how mainstream media are conceptualised as a site for mediated recognition in the city of Sydney, Australia. Utilising the notion of political listening, the analysis investigates how participants position certain media outlets as misrecognising the value of diverse voices. Through in-depth interviews, the article explores how audiences discuss perceived issues of significance to society in their recall of news coverage spanning politics, migration, international conflict and local crime. First, the article clarifies how participants construct specific racialised notions of Otherness by situating their use of mainstream media discourses in the context of their everyday communicative interactions. Second, it examines how racialised frameworks are mobilised by participants to evaluate certain news media as spaces of exclusion. This article posits that the participants’ discussions of these media spaces as being integral in fostering inclusion endows the media outlets with a capacity for enhancing everyday mechanisms of mediated recognition.

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Political articulations of identities and the nation occur both through the demands of the commercial current affairs format and the journalistic use of textual elements. The tabloid format engages in processes of politicising divergent cultural identities through the appeal to mass Australia. Indeed, the particular feature of ethnic individuals in content provides a hegemonic formation through which the ‘nation’ can be articulated. This article draws upon the discursive hegemony of Laclau and Mouffe to deliberate how the journalistic use of production elements functions to negotiate both identity and the nation through the sub-genre of sexuality. It uses a text-based analysis to argue that the content structure demonstrates how information can be constructed incongruously across production elements. The journalistic use of textual elements in Channel Seven's Today Tonight and Channel Nine's A Current Affair is analysed to reveal complexities in structuring discourses of the nation and representing identities.

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