[ecrea] a call from Academic Quarter > For Real?

*For Real?*

**

/Guest editors:/

Bent Sørensen, Aalborg University

Bo Allesøe, Aalborg University

Ole Ertlev Hansen, Aalborg University

Jørn Bjerre, Aarhus University

Academic Quarter presents a new call addressing the real and realism in 
a post-factual society. A number of new terms such as post-factual, fake 
news and post-truth have been proposed to describe the carelessness with 
which users of different media deal with matters of fact in our 
information-saturated society. One recent example is Trump adviser 
Kellyanne Conway defending the false description of the attendance at 
Trump’s inauguration, by claiming the falsehood as an “alternative 
fact”. Combined with the efforts of private companies and pressure 
groups to control and manipulate information so it will suit their 
interests (e.g. Berlusconi, Breitbart news, or 24nyt.dk), a “reality” 
emerges where truth seems bendable. Lies can be true if you repeat them 
long enough, and saying “I don’t believe it” has apparently become a 
fact to question all facts but itself. Why has it come to this?

Actually, this is nothing new. Already in the dialogue /Gorgias/, Plato 
had Socrates complain about the Sophists teaching about justice while 
having no real knowledge about justice itself. Asked by Socrates what 
the benefit of the Sophists’ efforts was, Gorgias replied: “The 
persuading of others about what is right and wrong”.Thus, Socrates 
concluded, what the Sophists were interested in were merely the /beliefs 
/of right and wrong and not what /is /right and wrong, and they failed 
to distinguish between /doxa /(mere belief) and /episteme /(true 
knowledge). Recently philosophers Daniel Dennett (2017) and Timothy 
Williamson (2017) have voiced similar Socratic responses, blaming 
post-modernist thinkers, like Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, for 
indirectly paving the way for fake news, accusing these thinkers of 
denying the possibility of distinguishing between true and false 
beliefs. This, however, seems to be a misunderstanding of at least some 
of these postmodern thinkers, since the predominant post-modern impetus 
was a critical impulse, only one directed towards the authority of 
modernity itself as /unjustified /(Hoy and McCarthy 1994). Instead the 
framing of reality through contingency and context was described as a 
condition for our understanding of the surrounding world, and our 
articulation of this understanding. Facing this untenable relativism of 
facts or knowledge presents a challenge to the understanding of what 
makes something more correct than something else, i.e. what makes the 
real real, and the fake fake. So, what are we to make of belief versus 
knowledge, facts versus fiction and fake versus real today?

/Academic Quarter /invites contributions to this special issue 
considering these topics addressing questions like: Are we faced with a 
new realism, or new “fake-ism” and if so, how do we recognize this? Is 
there a need to discuss realism anew? In what sense is knowledge about 
something real or fake knowledge? Do new media challenge what is 
considered real and fiction, and how does this affect our understanding 
of ourselves, each other and our surroundings? Possible contributors 
could address these, or other relevant questions in relation to 
different academic subjects and/or disciplines, be it on a theoretical 
and/or practical level, and with or without the mentioned examples as 
points of departure. Other examples could be, but are not limited to:


  * If realism is contingent on context and constructions of stories to
    frame it, what does that do to the status of *fiction*? Here current
    representations of *history *(historiographic metafiction, as Linda
    Hutcheon dubbed it (1984)) or factual events, such as *biographical
    *matter, could be interesting subjects to analyze. How do we
    represent slavery, the Holocaust, 9-11 and other devastating events
    in a post-factual ‘denier’ climate? Is it coincidental that some of
    the most simultaneously popular and challenging TV series deal with
    “alternative histories” (e.g. /The Man in the High Castle/), or
    simply make us question the ontological status of their story-worlds?
  * Within theories of media and communication, distinctions are made
    between e.g. *fiction films and documentary films *based on whether
    the content is seen as either entirely made up or a presentation of
    actual real-world events. Nevertheless, ever since the early days of
    film making, the validity of documentaries has been questioned and
    the contemporary use of fictionalization and mockumentary blurs the
    distinction even further. Does it still make sense to consider
    certain genres as especially connected to the real?

  * When Donald Trump stated that to him, the crowd at his inauguration
    looked like a million, he referred to his perceptual reality – to
    him this was real. News media referred to another reality and
    claimed their reality to be the objective real reality. A film that
    tried to present either of the experiences could therefore claim to
    present the real – a subjective vs. an objective real. How do we
    make a systematic account for the different kinds of *presentations
    of ‘the real’ within film and media*?
  * In the context of new media, e.g. social networks and user generated
    content, a distinction is made between the authentic or real and the
    performed presentation of the self. The question is if this kind of
    distinction makes sense? Performance as a concept can be traced back
    to Erving Goffman and the metaphorical use of the theater and the
    stage, the actor and the audience to understand communicative
    processes and has found widespread use within the research on
    *social media*. However, the metaphor is challenged by the fact that
    in social media, actors are their own simultaneous audience. Do we
    need a new kind of metaphor to encapsulate this phenomenon?
  * Another phenomenon in new media is *computer games and virtual
    online worlds *where the ability to be present in these worlds may
    trigger questions about the status of this presence as real – is the
    act of killing an opponent player in the game a real act or a
    fictional act?
  * Within the field of the sociology of education different debates on
    social realism have been carried out, based on the assumption that
    knowledge, the curriculum and education are emergent realities,
    formed within socially defined frames. Social reality is thus viewed
    as a reality sui generis, mediating our perception – and thus
    constitutes the fundamental categories by which we create our
    understanding. Based on a social realist epistemology, researchers
    such as Michael Young and Rob Moore, have criticized the spread of
    social constructivism and other relativisms within the educational
    world, arguing that it is based on a flawed understanding of the
    reality of the social. The fact that knowledge cannot be socially
    decontextualized does not imply that it is relative to social
    contexts, and that no objective criteria for evaluating knowledge
    exist.
*References*

Dennett, D. 2017. “Daniel Dennett: I begrudge every hour I have spent 
worrying about politics” 
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/12/daniel-dennett-politics-bacteria-bach-back-dawkins-trump-interview. 


Hoy, D., McCarthy, T. 1994. Critical Theory. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

Hutcheon, L. 1984. “Canadian Historiographic Metafiction.” Essays on 
Canadian Writing 30: 228-238.

Williamson, T. 2017, “Unthinkable: How do we ‘know’ anything? Relativist 
thinkers are providing a ‘smokescreen’ for the likes of Donald Trump, 
warns professor of logic Timothy Williamson” 
http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/unthinkable-how-do-we-know-anything-1.2992520. 


*Suggestions for Articles ***

The first step is to submit an abstract of about 150 words to be mailed 
to Dorthe Christophersen ((dorthe /at/ hum.aau.dk)) no later than September 15, 
2017. The editors will then review the abstracts and notify the authors 
of their decisions by October 1.

Accepted articles – using the Chicago System Style Sheet (http:// 
www.akademiskkvarter.hum. aau.dk/ pdf/AK_word_ template. docx) – should 
be e-mailed to the editors no later than January 1, 2018. Articles will 
then be reviewed anonymously in a double, blind peer review process by 
March 15. The articles should be around 15,000-25,000 keystrokes 
(3,000-3,500 words), and they can be written in English or in the 
Scandinavian languages. Assuming that the articles are accepted by the 
peer reviewers and the editors, they should be revised and the final 
version sent in by April 15, 2018. The issue is projected to be 
published in May 2018.

/Academic Quarter /is authorized by the Danish bibliometrical system, 
and the journal is subsidized by Det Frie Forskningsråd | Kultur og 
Kommunikation

//

/Submission of abstracts: September 15^th , 2017/

/Submission of article (review): January 1^st , 2018/

/Final Article: April 15^th , 2018/

/Publication: May, 2018///

/15000-25000 keystrokes (around 3000-3500 words)/

//





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