[ecrea] Call for papers - Special issue 3/2017 “The Remaking of Truth in the Digital Age”

Call  for paper:/CS Journal of Media Performing Arts and Cultural 
Studies./ Special issue 3/2017 “The Remaking of Truth in the Digital 
Age” edited by Chiara Giaccardi and Nathan Jurgenson

The deadline for abstract submission is: January 31st 2017

*The Special Issue *

Many thought Brexit would not come to pass, that Donald Trump could not 
be elected, experts, pollsters, and probability models told us so, down 
to the decimal point. An entire media apparatus that was increasingly 
certain came to produce instead confusion. The manufactured character of 
news becomes dramatically exposed, as well as the entertainment-driven 
nature of electoral politics that increasingly look like reality shows. 
The vacuum left behind is threatened to be filled with the rising tide 
of hate speech, hoaxes, and so-called fake news.

We introduce this project amidst this wave of anti-inclusionary and 
counter-informative forces. Populist movements around the globe are 
rallying against journalists, politicians, and other professionals and 
experts who themselves have failed to speak to and about the lives of 
these people. We are said to now be in a “post truth” time, one where 
debate over truth has been replaced by a chaos of facts, where the work 
of building knowledge feels exhausting and impossible, leading to a 
normalization of the surreal, the uncritical acceptance of heavily 
biased information as intuitive and unproblematic.

This issue is about our moment of epistemic chaos, the decline of old 
knowledge gatekeepers, and the political ramifications of fake, 
misleading, and propagandistic information. We pay special attention to 
the role of new, digital, social technologies of knowledge and their 
relationship with politics. We cannot understand how and what people 
know without understanding the set of information technologies in which 
we inhabit.

Those debates around the diminishing of traditional institutions being 
disrupted away by the rising tide and quickening flow of digitality are 
instructive, too, as institutions of epistemic authority, grapple with 
staying useful and relevant today. This issue is a meta-discourse on 
discourse in a time many have called “post truth.” What is it to do 
theoretical work in a so-called post-truth world without falling in the 
equally undesirable opposites of cynical functionalism (truth is merely 
what works, comforted in what they already know, and preserving the 
status quo) or a new positivism (paternalistic explainerism, where truth 
is a matter of numbers, and those in power claim a false objectivity). 
What might Foucault’s “parrhesia” mean today?

And, ontologically, the disagreement over the basic shape of thing in 
the world might lead to useless possibilities like a radical 
constructivism where reality is merely what we do with it or an 
essentialism where reality can somehow be perfectly grasped using the 
right methodologies. If reality is hard to grasp, its consequences are 
hard to miss: people suffer injustice and tourture, strive to survive in 
impossibly harsh conditions, and find ways of resilience and resistance. 
Suffering and death has a concreteness that escapes any rhetorical 
strategy, a reminder of the limits of the defeatism of simply claiming 
everything is fake or a simulation. Is there room for a critical realism 
that recognizes that reality always exceeds our capacity to grasp it? 
One that could suggest respect and care over arrogance and exploitation?

These crucial questions have precedent. A decade ago, conversations 
about the internet often centered on how truth and news and information 
more generally will flow when people have access to consume so much more 
information. And, only a little later, when so many more people can 
produce such information. Those debates around the introductions of 
Wikipedia, Google News, or Facebook Newsfeed are instructive today as we 
continue to struggle with how to incentivize, create, and sort 
information in ways that are accurate and just.

We should draw on the literature describing the history of political 
performance and propaganda. Global strategies of political 
misinformation and shaping information ecosystems to manufacture 
ideology and behavior shape and are shaped by the information 
technologies of their times, and these are lessons we need to draw from 
to understand our current moment. Is the epistemic vertigo being felt a 
feature or a flaw, a momentary readjustment or a new normal?

Describing our current situation should also draw on past thinking about 
knowledge, politics, and technology. For instance, the debates about 
positivism, the myth of the neutrality and objectivity of numbers and 
science are instructive. From “big data” science to “data journalism”, 
numbers play a large part in our contemporary data flows, from 
metric-based incentives like clicks, shares, and followers to the 
ubiquity of polling and probabilistic forecasting of elections. Indeed, 
the most important global news media entity, Facebook, claims it does 
not have a political or editorial philosophy because it is merely 
“technology”, a nod to the history of claiming false neutrality. How do 
we describe epistemic responsibility and pedagogy within a tech culture 
of supposed objective disinterest? Is there room to move beyond reducing 
people to numbers? Is a different “proxemics” based on closeness possible?

What is the role of social science in this discussion, especially with 
respect to new media technologies? Is there room for dialogue today, 
when information is consumed as a resource for belonging, for 
maintaining oppositional echo-chamber blocs, especially acknowledging 
the point that knowledge and understanding is never purely for its own 
sake but is always entwined with power? The knowledge-power link is no 
longer something that needs to be made convincing when more and more 
information is so overtly weaponized, targeted, in the Info Wars.

And how can social science speak to and about our own epistemic bubbles? 
What about the epistemic gap between those with and without college 
educations, those who and who are not part of the knowledge-work economy?

We welcome submissions about all of what we’ve talked about here, as 
well as the many more threads we did not mention relating to this 
complex theoretical topic.


*Deadlines & Guidelines*

Please send your abstract to: (redazione.cs /at/ unicatt.it) 
<mailto:(redazione.cs /at/ unicatt.it)> by *January 31, 2017*.

Notifications of acceptance will be emailed shortly after the deadline. 
Abstracts must be from 300 to 400 words long, and may be presented in 
English. The proposal shall include 5 keywords, authors, institution, 
and contacts (e-mail), together with a short curriculum for each author.

Authors will be asked to send the whole article (preferably in English, 
but Spanish, French and Italian are also welcome) by April 30, 2017.

Contributions will be sent to two independent reviewers in a 
double-blind procedure prior to publication decision. Articles should be 
between 4,000-5,000 words (no more than 35,000 characters, spaces and 
notes included), but shorter articles will also be considered.

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor currently 
under consideration for publication elsewhere.

A guide for authors, sample issues, and other relevant information is 
available on the journal’s website.

For further information or queries regarding this Special Issue, please 
contact the editors: (chiara.giaccardi /at/ unicatt.it) 
<mailto:(chiara.giaccardi /at/ unicatt.it)>; (nathanjurgenson /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(nathanjurgenson /at/ gmail.com)>


CS is A-class rated journal by ANVUR (Italian National Agency for the 
Evaluation of the University and Research Systems) in the three academic 
disciplines: Cinema, photography and television (L-ART/06), Performing 
arts (L-ART/05), and Sociology of culture and communication (SPS/08). 
The journal obtained an international recognition by the French AERES - 
Agence de l’évaluation de la recherche et de l’enseignement supérieur, 
being listed between its information and communication sciences 
journals. CS is included in the IATJ database – International Archive of 
Theatre Journals <http://www.iatj-journals.org/>, also accessible on the 
IFTR - International Federation for Theatre Research 
<http://www.firt-iftr.org/links>'s website and in SCOPUS.


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