Information environment researcher and writer, Marianne Elliott is set to chair a panel discussion at Same Same But Different as a part of Auckland Pride: Ki Tua Beyond Paradise. Photo / Matt Grace
Ahead of her Same Same But Different panel F**k and Other Words, as a part of Auckland Pride, Marianne Elliott explains how misinformation muddies our environments and highlights the strategies that could make things clearer.
Marianne Elliott, researcher and writer and the recently appointed head of engagement at Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Human Rights Commission, is deeply invested in storytelling.
More specifically, Elliott is interested in the stories we tell each other — and how we can better ensure they’re more truthful, more equitable and more respectful.
Elliott co-founded The Workshop, a research organisation that seeks to better understand complicated information environments and public narratives. Due to this work, she is all too aware of how false and harmful information pervades the discussions we have in Aotearoa.
At Same Same But Different, a dedicated five-day literary festival within Auckland Pride’s wide-ranging programming, Elliott will utilise this expertise and interest to chair F**k and Other Words.
The panel, which will also include activist and writer Shaneel Lal, news reporter Felix Desmarais and academic Alex Ker, aims to uncover and explore how writers in Aotearoa and abroad are impacted by and responding to anti-LGBTQIA+ campaigns.
Ahead of the much-anticipated panel, Elliott explains what misinformation looks like right now and looks forward to how we could make our information environments look a lot safer.
What are some of the key aims in the work you do at The Workshop?
Our interest at the Workshop is in creating a healthy information environment, where everybody has access to good information and where people understand important issues.
We’re often working with experts and spokespeople from different communities, to support them to find the most effective ways to say what they want people to know and understand. We work with climate change scientists, we work with queer communities, all sorts of different people, who are finding that public understanding of their experiences doesn’t match what they want people to understand.
As you can imagine, in order to get to communicating good information, we found we were constantly encountering harmful, inaccurate, false and bad information.
We started about four and a half years ago, diving in quite a deep way into researching harmful information; the conditions that created an environment to thrive, the most effective and evidence-informed ways to counter it, the impact that it has and the strategic interventions that governments and others could be taking to counter it.
And what does that spread of misinformation, particularly about queer communities, look like right now?
For as long as anybody has researched anything around the information environment, there’s always been misinformation and harmful information.
Some of it has always been intentionally harmful, spread by people who want to do harm. And some of it has always been unintentionally harmful, unintentionally misleading, spread by people who genuinely believe it.
What we’ve seen since I started my research on this, which was only about five years ago, was the impact of digital media on the spread — the way that the algorithms would enable you to find people who are already susceptible to certain kinds of beliefs and target them with false information that matched their existing beliefs.
The other contextual shift that we’ve seen, which is particularly relevant to this panel, is where you have bad faith actors who are wanting to accumulate more political power.
What has been documented and seen throughout human history is scapegoating being a big part of that. So, one of the ways that you create that kind of fear, is to pick a group of other people who are different to them and to spread a lot of false information about how harmful or dangerous that group is.
There has been a really significant amount of that scapegoating or targeting being directed at the queer community in general, for a long period of time. But I would say, recently there’s been a strong uptick in that being targeted particularly at transgender, non-binary and gender-diverse people.
I’m also a writer and really, really interested in the act of writing. Writing publicly has always been a brave act. If you choose to write and put that into the public space, there’s always been courage involved in that. And, when you are part of a community or identity group who are being targeted and scapegoated in this way, it becomes an even more risky and courageous act.
The idea of this panel [is to] look at the impact of this strategic targeting, particularly of trans, non-binary and gender-diverse people, and then getting the chance to talk with people who are writers and who are public figures and public researchers in that space.
Each of the panelists works and writes in slightly different spaces. That seems like a special opportunity — what are you interested to know about their experiences?
I’m really interested in what is useful. What helps? What are the things that people find are actually supportive?
I personally think that we’ve done a pretty good job as a group of academics and researchers in documenting this problem. I am really interested in documenting and elevating and giving a lot of space to solutions. [Especially] to solutions that come from people who are, themselves, living through the harm.
Is it really important to have specialist publications? What does it look like if your work is published in more mainstream spaces? What can be put in place to make that a safer experience for you?
It’s such important information, and we can’t find any solutions together as a society unless people who have that experience are leading the conversation — but it’s not currently a safe conversation to be a part of. Or, to put yourself publicly in that conversation. So, I’m really interested in talking about how we can do that in more safe and effective ways.
Can you talk about any strategies that you see as being particularly helpful?
We look at frames that give agency and dignity to people who are sharing aspects of their life. When they are positioned and framed as the experts, rather than [others] who are talking about [them]. So, there’s ways that people can be framed that position them as being experts in their own lives, as being people who have a lot to contribute.
Can you talk about the name of this panel? Why ‘F**k and Other Words’?
What it speaks to, for me, are the things that we, sometimes, aren’t allowed to say — the things that might be taken out of the story, the things that are part of our lives.
It has another side to it as well. Words are also being used to do a lot of harm to people in the queer community, and particularly to transgender, gender non-binary and gender diverse people. Words are being used in really harmful ways, so there is also a sense of the reclamation of words, of the things we’re not allowed to say, but also the things that have been said that were intended to harm.
Are there any other events at Same Same But Different that you’re looking forward to attending?
I wish I could. I will be attending Same Same But Different with my 4-year-old son.
I feel really grateful that they’ve included him in this, and that he’ll get to meet these panelists. I don’t know if he’ll get to sit through many things as he’s at quite a disruptive age [laughs], but I’m grateful he gets the chance to meet such amazing people and hopefully absorb some of their courage.
He takes in more sometimes than I give him credit for — I love that he’s growing up in a world where a whole range of pronouns are completely natural to him. We have friends who identify in all sorts of different ways and I don’t think it would have occurred to him for it to be any different. It’s nice.
And, amongst all this, are there any writers or works that you turn towards to find joy?
Probably the poets. I read a lot of non-fiction and a lot of fiction, but it’s probably our poets that bring me joy.
Arihia Latham, who is a local poet — she’s actually Kai Tahu but is based here in Wellington — writes beautiful, beautiful poetry. Some of it brings joy — it’s full of all kinds of different emotions actually. She writes about the natural world in ways that I find really spiritual and awe-inspiring. But, she also writes about being a mother, and a single mother, and the joys of that. And being in a body and the joys of that!
I have read so many wonderful fiction and non-fiction writers but I don’t have them sitting by my bed. The books that I have there for comfort, company, joy or inspiration – that would be our poets for sure. We should look after them better, aye?
Marianne Elliott will chair F**k and Other Words at Same Same But Different on February 17 at 10.30am.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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