The Politics of Voice and the Re-Integration of the Public Sphere: What Does Anthropology Have to Offer?

In the context of Australia’s 2023 referendum to recognise an Indigenous Voice to Parliament within its Constitution, we witnessed increasingly polarised discourse among advocates for both the Yes and No campaigns. Tailored news fed people radically different information about the Voice. Online forums—both those advocating conspiracy theories and those offering more mainstream advocacy—filtered out important contextual information and thus operated as online echo chambers and epistemic bubbles. Consequently, online forum users mostly only encountered (and contributed) information filtered to support a given worldview. Such extreme polarisation challenges complacent assumptions about the reach and operation of the public sphere. Yet bridging disparate worldviews is integral to the method and practice of ethnography. Drawing on examples of polarised discourse arising in the Voice debate, we outline how anthropologists can contribute to reinvigorating dialogic engagement and bridging divergent discourses within the public sphere. We reflect on everyday encounters, the importance of re-entangling contexts, negotiating vulnerability and dignity in ethnographic encounters, the limitations of anthropological practice, and the value of collaborating across disciplinary and practice boundaries.