[ecrea] Call for Papers: Digital Culture and Education, special edition - Truth or Dare: Truth, knowledge and power in the digital age

Truth or Dare: Truth, knowledge and power in the digital age


The ‘truth’ has been much contested lately. While much has been made of 
‘fake news’ and its impacts and implications, little has to date been 
made of the theoretical, ontological, and epistemological implications 
that arise. Digital platforms are creating communities that are using 
online affordances to challenge claims to truth, knowledge, and power by 
various establishments. This has manifested itself not only in the rise 
and re-emergence of rather extreme fringe communities such as the 
alt-right (Daniels, 2018) and ‘Flat Earthers’ (Dyer, 2018), but also in 
also in the use of social media by traditionally maligned communities 
such as LGBTQ youth (Gray, 2009, Jackson et al., 2017), asexual 
communities (Carrigan, 2011), or PoC communities (Florini, 2014). This 
complicated landscape prompts a number of broad question about the 
ontological and epistemological potential of the internet in a 
‘post-truth’ era, such as who gets to have truth? Whose truths are 
reflected online and offline? What truths are preferred? To which truths 
should education align itself and why?

It is increasingly clear that there is a need for research that 
addresses and unpacks the potential of the internet to provide a space 
in which to challenge established norms in an engaged way. As Emejulu & 
McGregor (2016, 12) points out in their call for radical digital 
literacies in education that there is a need for educational practices 
and research which explore “the process by which individuals and groups 
work together to build and maintain alternative communication 
infrastructure to enable marginalised groups to convey their own 
messages, bypassing the filters of commercial and state gatekeepers”. 
With this in mind, this special edition wishes to explore fractures in 
the relationships between truth, power, and knowledge as they play out 
in relation to digital cultures and education.  Papers may approach the 
topic from theoretical, conceptual, and/or empirical positions. Topics 
of interest include (but are not limited to) how digital spaces are 
challenging the ‘truths’ that underpin education:

Truths around the body and development
Truths around youth
Truths around knowledges
Truths around sexualities
Truths around gender
Truths around time
Truths around culture
Truths around discrimination
Truths around disability
Truths around agency
Truths around the individual
Truths around the value of education
This list is merely suggestive of the range of topics of interest to the 
editors and is not in any way restrictive of possible interpretations of 
the theme.  We encourage contributors to be imaginative in formulating 
ideas and paper proposals.

SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Abstracts of no more than 300 words – or inquiries – should be submitted 
via email to one of the editors by 05 November 2018. Editor contacts:

(Harry.T.Dyer /at/ uea.ac.uk)

(E.Priya /at/ uea.ac.uk)

(alexander.schmoelz /at/ univie.ac.at)

(V.Carrington /at/ uea.ac.uk)

Full Papers will be due by 30 June 2019. The word limit for articles is 
6,000 words (maximum) including Reference List. Papers that are not 
included in this special edition may nonetheless be considered for 
publication in future editions of Digital Culture and Education. Please 
visit http://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/submissions/ for the 
Style Guide for Authors.

References

Carrigan, M., (2011). There’s more to life than sex? Difference and 
commonality within the asexual community. Sexualities, 14(4), pp.462-478.

Daniels, J., (2018). The Algorithmic Rise of the “Alt-Right”. Contexts, 
17(1), pp.60-65.

Doherty, C., Kiley, J. and Johnson, B., (2016). In presidential contest, 
voters say “basic facts,” not just policies, are in dispute. Pew 
Research Center, October, 2016

Dyer, H., (2018) I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my 
research – here’s what I learnt. The Conversation. 
https://theconversation.com/i-watched-an-entire-flat-earth-convention-for-my-research-heres-what-i-learnt-95887

Emejulu, A. and McGregor, C., 2016. Towards a radical digital 
citizenship in digital education. Critical Studies in Education, pp.1-17.

Florini, S., (2014). Tweets, Tweeps, and Signifyin’ Communication and 
Cultural Performance on “Black Twitter”. Television & New Media, 15(3), 
pp.223-237.

Gray, M.L., (2009). Negotiating identities/queering desires: Coming out 
online and the

remediation of the coming‐out story. Journal of Computer‐Mediated 
Communication, 14(4), pp.1162-1189.

Jackson, S.J., Bailey, M. and Foucault Welles, B., 2017. # GirlsLikeUs: 
Trans advocacy and community building online. New Media & Society

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