Political communication increasingly isn’t just about having the strongest message, it’s about understanding how information moves. I’m interested in the relationship between message, messenger, medium and distribution: why some political ideas spread while others disappear, why the same message lands differently depending on who delivers it, and how platforms shape what people see, trust and act on. Most political actors obsess over the first and neglect the other three which is usually why their ideas disappear.

Some things I've learned from testing this in practice:

• Messenger often beats message. In our crowdsourced message testing, the most persuasive messages came from people who shared demographics and political history with the audience, not from professional comms people. In our pilot work distributing broadcast clips into Reform-adjacent spaces, a named, working-class trade unionist's account outperformed an anonymous "in-group" account on every metric — roughly 5x the views — while avoiding the platform bans that killed the anonymous ones. Authenticity is a distribution strategy, not just a virtue.
• Distribution Mechanics that grab attention are different depending on what platform you are on. If you want something to grab attention on TikTok you might make a very short video with a shocking hook. If you want to grab attention in a whatsapp group locally, asking a question and telling a "gossip like" story is way more effective.
• Proximity drives salience. Ads featuring local candidates consistently beat national politicians; in one pilot, everyone who scanned a QR code on a leaflet lived within 1km of the local issue it discussed. People pay attention to politics that is recognisably theirs.

Through my work across campaigns, organising, experimentation and political technology, I’ve explored how political attention forms in practice , from local Facebook groups and messaging apps to campaign content, community networks and conversational spaces. I can help fellows think about questions like: How do people actually encounter politics today? When does messenger matter more than message? How do platform incentives shape behaviour? Why do some issues suddenly become politically salient? How do trust and legitimacy get built online? And how do you design political interventions that create participation rather than simply visibility?

I’m particularly interested in moving beyond broadcast models of politics towards understanding politics as something relational and distributed, built through networks, conversations, repeated interactions and trusted messengers rather than centralised communication alone.