African Australian Online Representation: Countering Negative Discourses through Expressions of Intent and Action

Previous research indicates that Africans in Australia are negatively represented in the Australian news media (Weber et al. 2021; Nolan et al. 2011; Nolan, et al. 2018), and that African Australians themselves find this coverage to be hurtful and to increase their experiences of racism (Farquharson et al. 2017) .Less is known about how African Australians choose to represent themselves and their businesses, particularly in websites and on social media. Using Pauwel’s (2012) multimodal framework for website analysis, we conducted a qualitative analysis of how African Australian organisations represent themselves online. We found that these organisations demonstrated their political and economic agency through expressions of intent that described their objectives and aims, and expressions of action that demonstrated their agency. We argue that these expressions provide strong counter-narratives to the dominant negative media discourses, and can be viewed as a form of everyday anti-racism.