AANZCA2025: ‘turning the tides’: communication studies in an age of epistemic flux

This introduction situates the nine papers selected for this Media International Australia AANZCA2025 Feature Topic. These papers were originally presented at the 2025 Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand Communication Association (AANZCA) conference hosted by the University of the Sunshine Coast (26–28 November 2025) amid an accelerating crisis of credibility in knowledge production. Social media and generative AI have deepened the destabilisation of various knowledge orders and fields of expertise, i.e., who gets to make knowledge and judge its veracity. This has reshaped public trust in expertise in general and journalistic knowledge production in particular, with profound implications for civic engagement and public deliberation. We argue that communication and media studies must continue recalibrating its theoretical and methodological tools to help turn the ‘tides’ of disengagement and democratic backsliding. Collectively, the nine papers in this Feature Topic demonstrate that the ongoing epistemic flux in our society and in our scholarship is not a uniform phenomenon, but one that plays out unevenly across audiences, industries and platforms, producing both new vulnerabilities and new forms of resistance and resilience.