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