Truth's Mobility: The Political Milieu for Strategizing Truth Across People, Places, and Time

• In Event: 28.066 - Viral Modernity in Education: Deconstructing Post-Truth

Abstract

Truth’s resonance, scale and uptake reflect some of the dimensions of ways of knowing consistent with various studies of the positioning of and mobilization of information. In scholarly circles, they entail debates tied to colonization and ethics, sociological analyses of global movements, positionality and identity, critical reflexology and mindfulness. Outside of the academy, the interrogation of truth is embedded within national and international contestations focused on social, economic and environmental considerations as well as debates around nationalism, isolationism, protectionism, ego-centrism, interdependencies, alliances. social responsibility, digital ethics, humanizing perspectives and l ecology. Investigative journals have placed these developments under their microscopes (e.g. Bump, 2018; Kakutani, 2018)) studying rhetoric moves (e.g., pivoting, timeliness) and related appeals and truth claims to forms of fact checking and consistency. Scholars have examined the sociolinguistic dimensions including how views and pronouncements of the world are advanced differentially valued, recognized, reproduced, fused and integrated (Lakoff, 2017)
The present study examines how truth advances -- mobilized or immobilized-- how, why, and under what conditions. The framework takes mobility as its central dialectic, examining how materiality and claims of truth are dynamically configured across varied temporalities and spaces. To study how “ideas and ideologies” travel, transform and persist across time and space, accounts of events and claims arising within the current US political milieu are examined by using three complementary forms of analyses: a rhetorical analysis detailing how the author positions themselves in relationship to ideas and possible audiences over time (e.g., SELF 2nd AUTHOR, 1995); mobility analyses of how these ideas travel in terms of scale, resonance, uptake and affiliations (Stornaiuolo, Smith, Phillips, 2017) within and across different spaces (Leander and Sheehy, 2004) ; and an analyses of argumentative elements tied to evidence, warrants and claims (e.g., Sheehy, 2016; Toulmin1958). The study establishes new tools for exploring how ideas travel across different spaces and brings to the fore the range of practices enlisted and their influences (e.g., cultural streams to mobilize claims, jurisdiction constraints to immobilize strands of thought, personification practices and range of traditional rhetoric ploys to direct thinking; strategic position the audience, topics/ideas and authors to cast ideas in certain ways, the repeated insistence that perpetuate views of knowledge as social constructions without equivalence in reality). The strategic ploys draw from the unintended consequences of post modernism and the blending of disinformation with info-entertainment practices for take up by targeted groups and as a way of scaling up wider support in the interest of arguing for universals.

Author

• Robert J. Tierney, The University of British Columbia, The University of Sydney, Beijing Normal University