Traditions, Truths, and Trolls: Critical Pedagogies in the Era of Fake News

Abstract

Unsettling dominant narratives as well as the authority of voice of the credentialed ‘expert,’ critical pedagogies have always been disruptive. But, as we are increasingly called to acknowledge, what many might regard as the healthy skepticism of reflexive critical scrutiny or a commitment to the contingent and constructed nature of social life has darker analogues in what at times seems the wholesale abandonment of reliable ‘truth’ or knowledge claims. Once the stock-in-trade of internet trolls, ‘alternative facts’—as US presidential counselor and erstwhile Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway blithely termed them—openly ‘inform’ public discourse and, in turn, move the boundaries of political possibility. Rightly alarmed at these developments, a rising chorus in the academy urgently recommends a retreat from the world of indeterminate knowledge claims wrought from myriad critical interventions of recent decades. But though the fears behind this are well-founded, renewing faith in (or perhaps longing for) stable truths is to trade one chimera for another. Moreover, it misses the point that much more at issue than truths, per se, are regulatory practices of knowledge production and validation. Critical approaches have much to offer by way of a corrective here if taken together with a collegial ‘ethos’ in teaching and learning.