Stacy Blasiola (Communication) was among a handful of PhD students from around the world selected to participate in the Queensland Univeristy of Technology's CCI Winter School in Australia in June. This Winter School is a program of interdisciplinary study, collaboration and social interaction in the broad area of creative industries and innovation research, drawing on the Centre’s expertise in media, cultural and communication studies, economics, education, policy and law, in relation to the creative economy. 

While there, Blasiola worked with legal scholars Nicolas Suzor and Angela Daly to refine her paper "Communication Practices and Technical Activist Actions on #CISPA." Her paper operationalizes the concept of Technical Activist Actions to better understand how digital activists leverage the affordances of Twitter and exploit the structure of the network to control information flows and conduct disruptive behaviors such as mass spamming via the @reply function. Findings indicate that activists in the #CISPA discussion network did engage in Technical Activist Actions but unlike hacktivists or cyberterrorists, those in the #CISPA discussion were limited in the types of Technical Activist Actions they employed, possibly a result of their desire to operate within the confines of the law.