28.066 - Viral Modernity in Education: Deconstructing Post-Truth

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

The panel will discuss various aspects of post-truths as both emergent from and key effects on education, as negatively affecting societies and Earth holistically. The session will begin with analyzing and countering arguments that post-truthism emerged from postmodern scholarship, within truth-telling as a Western deep cultural practice. Post-truthists have largely perverted rigorous postmodern scholarship to construct false truths based on individualism and socio-historical othering, in parallel with intensifying neoliberalism. After the presentations on critically analyzing arguments of the continuum and tangents of postmodernism to post-truthism, the last presentations analyzing how post-truthism has affected how we define and teach “development” and “sustainable development, roles of feminism and feminist pedagogies in constructing “honest” conversations, and analyses on how truth advances – im/mobilized.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Foucault and Contemporary Theory in Education

Chair

• Michael Peters, Beijing Normal University

Papers

• Viral Modernity in Education: From Postmodernism to Post-Truth? - Michael Peters, Beijing Normal University

• Defending the Western Tradition of Truth-Telling - Tina Besley, Beijing Normal University

• Post-Truth Development as De-Development: An Eco-Pedagogical Analysis - Greg William Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University

• Council Circles on Sensitive Topics as a Feminist Praxis of Resistance in "Post-Truth" Times - Lauren Ila Misiaszek, Beijing Normal University

• Truth's Mobility: The Political Milieu for Strategizing Truth Across People, Places, and Time - Robert J. Tierney, The University of British Columbia, The University of Sydney, Beijing Normal University

Discussant

• Carlos Alberto Torres, University of California - Los Angeles