Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1937251
F. Andreescu
ABSTRACT This article explores covid-19 as a social traumatic event that thoroughly disrupted our ordinary plane of existence. In doing so, it opened a window to an uncanny world, in which the virus, manifesting profuse agentic capacity, repurposes to its benefit, to travel and multiply, human bodies and various global assemblages. Covid-19 pandemic’s challenge to the social grounding structure in turn perturbs our sense of ontological security. Meditating on these aspects, the article identifies the pandemic as a liminal situation that confronts humanity with all four givens of existence: death, freedom, isolation, and meaningless. Written during these unique global circumstances, the article directs its attention towards covid-19 social trauma and to several societal responses. These take the form of conspiratorial mythical thinking, communities formed around a shared existential state of vulnerability, as well as emancipation and revolutionary political acts.
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Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1936106
B. Hamamra, Ahmad Qabaha
ABSTRACT The online mode of education has created a space for a decolonial pedagogy that allows student liberation from in-class education which perpetuates students’ passivity. Drawing on Freire’s concepts of banking education, dialogue and democracy, Said’s various works and concepts, including ‘margins’ and ‘centres’, and students’ testimonies concerning online and in-class modes of education, we contend that online education shatters the hegemony of instructors over the process of education. While students air their proclivity for emancipation from the hegemonic intricacy of the traditional classroom, instructors also highlight the importance of dialogue, research and enriching discussions that subvert the teacher-student hierarchy. While some instructors used to follow research and dialogue in class, they encountered challenges in introducing topics related to sexuality, politics and religion. However, these issues have shored up during online education as the emphasis on the part of instructors and students has been on constructing arguments rather than memorising materials. Thus, the online education we have been forced to adopt is a call for a paradigm shift in the sense that the traditional mode of education perpetuates students’ passivity and suppression of their voices in ways that resonate with the suppression of Palestinian voices by the Israeli-settler colonialism.
{"title":"‘Can the subaltern speak?’: COVID-19 and decolonial pedagogy in Palestinian universities","authors":"B. Hamamra, Ahmad Qabaha","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1936106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1936106","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The online mode of education has created a space for a decolonial pedagogy that allows student liberation from in-class education which perpetuates students’ passivity. Drawing on Freire’s concepts of banking education, dialogue and democracy, Said’s various works and concepts, including ‘margins’ and ‘centres’, and students’ testimonies concerning online and in-class modes of education, we contend that online education shatters the hegemony of instructors over the process of education. While students air their proclivity for emancipation from the hegemonic intricacy of the traditional classroom, instructors also highlight the importance of dialogue, research and enriching discussions that subvert the teacher-student hierarchy. While some instructors used to follow research and dialogue in class, they encountered challenges in introducing topics related to sexuality, politics and religion. However, these issues have shored up during online education as the emphasis on the part of instructors and students has been on constructing arguments rather than memorising materials. Thus, the online education we have been forced to adopt is a call for a paradigm shift in the sense that the traditional mode of education perpetuates students’ passivity and suppression of their voices in ways that resonate with the suppression of Palestinian voices by the Israeli-settler colonialism.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1936106","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47597861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1922803
Tom Grimwood
ABSTRACT Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi concludes his analysis of critical malaise in late capitalism with a bold call to arms: post-liberal dystopia must be faced and dissolved by irony. He argues for a renewed ironic autonomy, which emphasises the independence of mind from knowledge and the excessive nature of the imagination. Developing Berardi’s argument, I suggest there are three obstacles to theorising irony as a form of politics. The first is that a politics of irony is often accused of being either a fraudulent or amoral form of politics, which has itself allowed a post-liberal malaise to fester and grow. The second problem is that irony may no longer be simply an ambivalent tool of critique from the edges of political discourse, but instead a tool which perpetuates its very centre. The third problem is that theorising the performance and place of irony in relation to political critique often results in a slippage from the complexity of the second problem to the impasse of the first. I argue that Berardi’s ‘ironic autonomy’ is entirely possible, so long as the politics of irony is understood as depending on the different forms and media of interpretative space through which contemporary politics takes place.
{"title":"The politics of irony, reconsidered","authors":"Tom Grimwood","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1922803","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1922803","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi concludes his analysis of critical malaise in late capitalism with a bold call to arms: post-liberal dystopia must be faced and dissolved by irony. He argues for a renewed ironic autonomy, which emphasises the independence of mind from knowledge and the excessive nature of the imagination. Developing Berardi’s argument, I suggest there are three obstacles to theorising irony as a form of politics. The first is that a politics of irony is often accused of being either a fraudulent or amoral form of politics, which has itself allowed a post-liberal malaise to fester and grow. The second problem is that irony may no longer be simply an ambivalent tool of critique from the edges of political discourse, but instead a tool which perpetuates its very centre. The third problem is that theorising the performance and place of irony in relation to political critique often results in a slippage from the complexity of the second problem to the impasse of the first. I argue that Berardi’s ‘ironic autonomy’ is entirely possible, so long as the politics of irony is understood as depending on the different forms and media of interpretative space through which contemporary politics takes place.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1922803","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48641876","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-04-03DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1937250
C. Fernández-Rodríguez, Luis M. Romero-Rodríguez
ABSTRACT This study aims to diagnose how the cinema of cruelty has been inserted into mainstream culture through the current streaming series, analysing the elements of the eroticism of perversity and the cinema of cruelty in the series Chernobyl and Years and Years (HBO: 2019). This is done with the design of a content analysis sheet based on the interpretation of theoretical constructs, validated by expert judgement. The results diagnose an excess of trivialised cruelty, evidencing the spectator’s desensitisation to the images, as well as their fascination with them. In this sense, the growing audiovisual success of misanthropic, entertaining, and pornographic narratives is evident. It is concluded that discomfort, fun, horror pornography, and their respective prestige, are installed in contemporary popular television culture, reproducing a relationship between the depressing and the entertainment.
{"title":"The cinema of cruelty in streaming: elements of perversity in Chernobyl and years and years","authors":"C. Fernández-Rodríguez, Luis M. Romero-Rodríguez","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1937250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1937250","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This study aims to diagnose how the cinema of cruelty has been inserted into mainstream culture through the current streaming series, analysing the elements of the eroticism of perversity and the cinema of cruelty in the series Chernobyl and Years and Years (HBO: 2019). This is done with the design of a content analysis sheet based on the interpretation of theoretical constructs, validated by expert judgement. The results diagnose an excess of trivialised cruelty, evidencing the spectator’s desensitisation to the images, as well as their fascination with them. In this sense, the growing audiovisual success of misanthropic, entertaining, and pornographic narratives is evident. It is concluded that discomfort, fun, horror pornography, and their respective prestige, are installed in contemporary popular television culture, reproducing a relationship between the depressing and the entertainment.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1937250","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42589398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-23DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1899891
Hiba Ghanem
ABSTRACT The ongoing 17 October 2019 Lebanese protests mark a critical moment that historicises the struggle of a people, from different sectarian and religious backgrounds, against political corruption. Tripoli, a conservative Sunni-majority city in Northern Lebanon, has caught the attention of researchers as its protests took the form of a ‘rave party’ held in its main public square, known as al-Nur Square. This article investigates the Tripolitan protests through the lens of Agamben’s Profanations to highlight the dynamics of the al-Nur Square protests that seem to conflate the religious and the political. The article specifically argues that the protestors reconfigure the space around the square in an attempt at profaning the sectarian apparatus that takes the ‘Allah’ icon as its centre. In their spatial attempt at profanation, however, the protestors seem to preserve the religious intact, thus giving credibility to their de-sectarianising act. Such an analytical reading of the protest sheds light on the spatial dynamics inherent in any Lebanese attempt at reform, including the 17 October 2019 protests. These protests become historical records that trace the protestors’ continuous negotiation of the religious and the political that embeds the attempt at de-sectarianisation within every demand they have for political reform.
{"title":"Spatial profanation of lebanese sectarianism: al-nūr square and the 17 October 2019 protests","authors":"Hiba Ghanem","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1899891","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1899891","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The ongoing 17 October 2019 Lebanese protests mark a critical moment that historicises the struggle of a people, from different sectarian and religious backgrounds, against political corruption. Tripoli, a conservative Sunni-majority city in Northern Lebanon, has caught the attention of researchers as its protests took the form of a ‘rave party’ held in its main public square, known as al-Nur Square. This article investigates the Tripolitan protests through the lens of Agamben’s Profanations to highlight the dynamics of the al-Nur Square protests that seem to conflate the religious and the political. The article specifically argues that the protestors reconfigure the space around the square in an attempt at profaning the sectarian apparatus that takes the ‘Allah’ icon as its centre. In their spatial attempt at profanation, however, the protestors seem to preserve the religious intact, thus giving credibility to their de-sectarianising act. Such an analytical reading of the protest sheds light on the spatial dynamics inherent in any Lebanese attempt at reform, including the 17 October 2019 protests. These protests become historical records that trace the protestors’ continuous negotiation of the religious and the political that embeds the attempt at de-sectarianisation within every demand they have for political reform.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1899891","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48755079","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-10DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1898912
Pablo Navazo-Ostúa, Eva Aladro-Vico, Olga Bailey
ABSTRACT The Young British Artists (YBAs) was a generation that incorporated elements from media, advertising and cultural industry into the art world in the late 20th century. Based on a case study of the group and the distinctive phases of its meteoric trajectory, we analyse the circumstances and agents involved in the processes of legitimisation in contemporary art. As an instrumental tool, we use the model presented by Alan Bowness in his publication, which outlines the process that allows artists to access certain social recognition. This outline provides us with a model of reference upon which to reconstruct the pattern of the YBAs trajectory to determine the sociocultural circumstances surrounding the media phenomenon. These results also correct and modify certain aspects of Bowness’ model to adapt it to the current socioeconomic context that sustains the processes of legitimisation of art today.
{"title":"Processes of legitimization in contemporary Art: the young British Artists phenomenon","authors":"Pablo Navazo-Ostúa, Eva Aladro-Vico, Olga Bailey","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1898912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1898912","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Young British Artists (YBAs) was a generation that incorporated elements from media, advertising and cultural industry into the art world in the late 20th century. Based on a case study of the group and the distinctive phases of its meteoric trajectory, we analyse the circumstances and agents involved in the processes of legitimisation in contemporary art. As an instrumental tool, we use the model presented by Alan Bowness in his publication, which outlines the process that allows artists to access certain social recognition. This outline provides us with a model of reference upon which to reconstruct the pattern of the YBAs trajectory to determine the sociocultural circumstances surrounding the media phenomenon. These results also correct and modify certain aspects of Bowness’ model to adapt it to the current socioeconomic context that sustains the processes of legitimisation of art today.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1898912","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46500350","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-03-02DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1894374
Leslie Chapman
ABSTRACT This article explores the idea that what Samuel Hynes has described as ‘The Myth of the (Great) War can be analysed both as a trauma narrative and as a cultural dream. The argument draws upon Lacan’s proposition in Seminar XVII that the Oedipus complex is ‘Freud’s dream’, an idea which Lacan develops within the context of his theory of the four discourses. Just as Lacan argues in the Seminar that ‘Freud’s dream’ is an attempt to ‘save the father’ from symbolic castration, the argument put forward in this paper is that the Myth of the Great War is an attempt to ‘save’ the upper and upper-middle class culture of late Victorian and early Edwardian England from its own form of symbolic castration. As a trauma narrative it can be seen as an attempt to give meaning to a meaningless experience, but as a dream it becomes possible to identify, within its ‘manifest content’, what Freud called the ‘navel of the dream’, the point where interpretation reaches its limit and which in Lacanian terms can be defined as the Real of the dream. This is illustrated through the analysis of a famous Great War poem by Wilfred Owen.
{"title":"The dream of the Great War","authors":"Leslie Chapman","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1894374","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1894374","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the idea that what Samuel Hynes has described as ‘The Myth of the (Great) War can be analysed both as a trauma narrative and as a cultural dream. The argument draws upon Lacan’s proposition in Seminar XVII that the Oedipus complex is ‘Freud’s dream’, an idea which Lacan develops within the context of his theory of the four discourses. Just as Lacan argues in the Seminar that ‘Freud’s dream’ is an attempt to ‘save the father’ from symbolic castration, the argument put forward in this paper is that the Myth of the Great War is an attempt to ‘save’ the upper and upper-middle class culture of late Victorian and early Edwardian England from its own form of symbolic castration. As a trauma narrative it can be seen as an attempt to give meaning to a meaningless experience, but as a dream it becomes possible to identify, within its ‘manifest content’, what Freud called the ‘navel of the dream’, the point where interpretation reaches its limit and which in Lacanian terms can be defined as the Real of the dream. This is illustrated through the analysis of a famous Great War poem by Wilfred Owen.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-03-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1894374","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48972811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1886423
S. Lewandowsky
ABSTRACT There has been much concern with the abundance of misinformation in public discourse. Although misinformation has always played a role in political debate, its character has shifted from support for a specific position to a ‘shock and chaos’ stream of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Exposure to conspiracy theories can have considerable adverse impact on society. I argue that scholars therefore have a responsibility to combat conspiracy theories and misinformation generally. Exercising this responsibility requires an understanding of the varied rhetorical roles of conspiracy theories. Here I focus on instances in which people reject unequivocal scientific evidence and invoke conspiracy theories, or radical anti-institutional positions, based on ideological imperatives. I argue that those positions do not always reflect true attitudes. Instead, people may deploy extreme rhetoric as a pragmatic tool of political expression. I investigate this possibility by focusing on the role of conspiracy theories in the rejection of science. Conspiracist cognition and rhetoric violate the epistemic standards that underpin science. Ironically, this violation of epistemic standards renders conspiracy theories useful as a rationally deployed tool that serves political purposes. I present a study that confirms that conspiracy theories can be deployed to support worldview-motivated denial of science. I provide suggestions how scholars can debunk or defang conspiratorial rhetoric.
{"title":"Conspiracist cognition: chaos, convenience, and cause for concern","authors":"S. Lewandowsky","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1886423","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1886423","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT There has been much concern with the abundance of misinformation in public discourse. Although misinformation has always played a role in political debate, its character has shifted from support for a specific position to a ‘shock and chaos’ stream of misinformation and conspiracy theories. Exposure to conspiracy theories can have considerable adverse impact on society. I argue that scholars therefore have a responsibility to combat conspiracy theories and misinformation generally. Exercising this responsibility requires an understanding of the varied rhetorical roles of conspiracy theories. Here I focus on instances in which people reject unequivocal scientific evidence and invoke conspiracy theories, or radical anti-institutional positions, based on ideological imperatives. I argue that those positions do not always reflect true attitudes. Instead, people may deploy extreme rhetoric as a pragmatic tool of political expression. I investigate this possibility by focusing on the role of conspiracy theories in the rejection of science. Conspiracist cognition and rhetoric violate the epistemic standards that underpin science. Ironically, this violation of epistemic standards renders conspiracy theories useful as a rationally deployed tool that serves political purposes. I present a study that confirms that conspiracy theories can be deployed to support worldview-motivated denial of science. I provide suggestions how scholars can debunk or defang conspiratorial rhetoric.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1886423","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42802957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1886421
Eileen Culloty
ABSTRACT Conspiracy theories have become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary culture. From a communication studies perspective, conspiracy theories undermine democratic communication by misleading the public. However, the normative concept of a democratic public sphere also upholds the values of giving visibility to diverse perspectives and facilitating reasoned debate. Thus, academics can acknowledge the harms of conspiracy claims while being open, in principle, to their potential contribution to public debate. The challenge, of course, is to evaluate the public sphere implications of conspiracy claims; implications that may be difficult to ascertain and may change over time as new evidence emerges. This position is elucidated through an analysis of the conspiracy claims found in mainstream and alternative media coverage of the Syrian conflict. Much of the debate centres on ideas about the trustworthiness and impartiality of journalists and experts whereby efforts to establish the facts are superseded by received ideas about the credibility of sources. Ultimately, the Syrian conflict indicates that conspiracy claims can be valuable for the public sphere provided there are impartial actors willing to investigate conspiracy claims and provide clarification to the public.
{"title":"Evaluating conspiracy claims as public sphere communication","authors":"Eileen Culloty","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1886421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1886421","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Conspiracy theories have become a ubiquitous feature of contemporary culture. From a communication studies perspective, conspiracy theories undermine democratic communication by misleading the public. However, the normative concept of a democratic public sphere also upholds the values of giving visibility to diverse perspectives and facilitating reasoned debate. Thus, academics can acknowledge the harms of conspiracy claims while being open, in principle, to their potential contribution to public debate. The challenge, of course, is to evaluate the public sphere implications of conspiracy claims; implications that may be difficult to ascertain and may change over time as new evidence emerges. This position is elucidated through an analysis of the conspiracy claims found in mainstream and alternative media coverage of the Syrian conflict. Much of the debate centres on ideas about the trustworthiness and impartiality of journalists and experts whereby efforts to establish the facts are superseded by received ideas about the credibility of sources. Ultimately, the Syrian conflict indicates that conspiracy claims can be valuable for the public sphere provided there are impartial actors willing to investigate conspiracy claims and provide clarification to the public.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1886421","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47220747","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/14797585.2021.1886424
Jaron Harambam
ABSTRACT Various societal and academic actors argue that conspiracy theories should be debunked by insisting on the truthfulness of real “facts” provided by established epistemic institutions. But are academic scholars the appropriate actors to correct people’s beliefs and is that the right and most productive thing to do? Drawing on years of ethnographic research experiences in the Dutch conspiracy milieu, I explain in this paper why debunking conspiracy theories is not possible (can scholars actually know the real truth?), not professional (is taking sides in truth wars what we should do?), and not productive (providing more “correct” information won’t work as knowledge acceptance is not just a cognitive/epistemic issue). Instead of reinstalling the modernist legitimation narrative of science, I argue in this paper for an alternative that is both epistemologically stronger and sociologically more effective. Building from research and experiments with epistemic democracy in the field of science and technology studies, I propose to have “deliberative citizen knowledge platforms”, instead of elite experts groups alone, asses the quality of public information. Such societally representative bodies should enjoy more legitimacy and epistemic diversity to better deal with conspiracy theories and the broader societal conflicts over truth and knowledge they represent.
{"title":"Against modernist illusions: why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories","authors":"Jaron Harambam","doi":"10.1080/14797585.2021.1886424","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14797585.2021.1886424","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Various societal and academic actors argue that conspiracy theories should be debunked by insisting on the truthfulness of real “facts” provided by established epistemic institutions. But are academic scholars the appropriate actors to correct people’s beliefs and is that the right and most productive thing to do? Drawing on years of ethnographic research experiences in the Dutch conspiracy milieu, I explain in this paper why debunking conspiracy theories is not possible (can scholars actually know the real truth?), not professional (is taking sides in truth wars what we should do?), and not productive (providing more “correct” information won’t work as knowledge acceptance is not just a cognitive/epistemic issue). Instead of reinstalling the modernist legitimation narrative of science, I argue in this paper for an alternative that is both epistemologically stronger and sociologically more effective. Building from research and experiments with epistemic democracy in the field of science and technology studies, I propose to have “deliberative citizen knowledge platforms”, instead of elite experts groups alone, asses the quality of public information. Such societally representative bodies should enjoy more legitimacy and epistemic diversity to better deal with conspiracy theories and the broader societal conflicts over truth and knowledge they represent.","PeriodicalId":44587,"journal":{"name":"Journal for Cultural Research","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14797585.2021.1886424","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48306573","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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