Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World

Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World

Author: H. Sidky

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-11-12

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1793606528

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At the end of 2019, Americans were living in an era of post-truth characterized by fake news, weaponized lies, alternative facts, conspiracy theories, magical thinking, and irrationalism. While many complex interconnected factors were at work, this post-truth era was partly the culmination of a cadre of anthropologists and other academics in American universities and colleges during the 1980’s and 1990’s. In Science and Anthropology in a Post-Truth World, H. Sidky examines how their untoward dalliance with problematic and dangerous ideas by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard, Bruno Latour, and Jean Baudrillard informed and empowered a forceful assault on science and truth in the following decades by corporate organizations, politicians, religious extremists, and right-wing populists.


Engaged Persuasion in a Post-Truth World

Engaged Persuasion in a Post-Truth World

Author: Stephen K. Hunt

Publisher:

Published: 2021-09-20

Total Pages: 450

ISBN-13: 9781516548231

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Engaged Persuasion in a Post-Truth World provides an innovative approach to inspire students' interest in persuasive communication in today's ever-evolving world. The book moves beyond theory and addresses new media, engaged citizenship, and deconstructing messages in a post-truth world to deepen students' exploration of persuasion. This multi-disciplinary, research-driven textbook highlights contemporary studies in persuasion. It covers the dynamics of persuasion, including important source, receiver, and message components while also exploring the effects of persuasive communication on receivers' attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviors. Students examine the application of persuasive communication concepts and theories to their lives in multiple contemporary contexts, such as campus, residence, workplace, classroom, and online communities. Unique themes explored in the book include the application of contemporary persuasion theory and research to the post-truth era, the influence of new media on persuasive communication, and how students can use persuasion to become civically engaged and advance the common good. A highly relevant and wholly original approach, Engaged Persuasion in a Post-Truth World is an exemplary text for courses in persuasive communication.


Post-Truth

Post-Truth

Author: James Ball

Publisher: Biteback Publishing

Published: 2017-05-11

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 1785902504

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2016 marked the birth of the post-truth era. Sophistry and spin have coloured politics since the dawn of time, but two shock events - the Brexit vote and Donald Trump's elevation to US President - heralded a departure into murkier territory. From Trump denying video evidence of his own words, to the infamous Leave claims of £350 million for the NHS, politics has rarely seen so many stretching the truth with such impunity. Bullshit gets you noticed. Bullshit makes you rich. Bullshit can even pave your way to the Oval Office. This is bigger than fake news and bigger than social media. It's about the slow rise of a political, media and online infrastructure that has devalued truth. This is the story of bullshit: what's being spread, who's spreading it, why it works - and what we can do to tackle it.


Post-Truth Society

Post-Truth Society

Author: Arpad Szakolczai

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2021-11-29

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1000506118

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It is widely asserted that we are now living in a post-truth society. What that means, this book argues, is that the contemporary global world is thoroughly infested not only with trickster figures but an entire and operational trickster logic; or, that we now live in a Trickster Land – an argument advanced by the claim that in modernity liminality has become permanent; or that modern life is patently absurd. The first part of the book presents a series of ‘guides’ to this condition, in the form of key thinkers and writers who can help us understand and navigate our Trickster Land. Such guides include Hermann Broch, Lewis Hyde, Roberto Calasso, Michel Serres, Sándor Márai, Colin Thubron and Albert Camus. The second part goes on to discuss five main regions of Trickster Land: art, thought, the economy, politics and society. This last, central chapter of the book contrasts trickster logic with the basic, foundational logic of social life, presented as gift-giving by Marcel Mauss and as sociability by Georg Simmel, and which is expressed here, combining Heraclitus and Plato with the Gospel of John, by three basic terms of ancient Greek culture, as arkhé charis logos: meaningful social life originally and in its essence is animated by the power of kind benevolence. This volume will appeal to scholars of social theory, anthropology and sociology with interests in political thought and contemporary culture.


Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order

Social Media and the Post-Truth World Order

Author: Gabriele Cosentino

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-03-16

Total Pages: 151

ISBN-13: 3030430057

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This book discusses post-truth not merely as a Western issue, but as a problematic political and cultural condition with global ramifications. By locating the roots of the phenomenon in the trust crisis suffered by liberal democracy and its institutions, the book argues that post-truth serves as a space for ideological conflicts and geopolitical power struggles that are reshaping the world order. The era of post-truth politics is thus here to stay, and its reach is increasingly global: Russian trolls organizing events on social media attended by thousands of unaware American citizens; Turkish pro-government activists amplifying on Twitter conspiracy theories concocted via Internet imageboards by online subcultures in the United States; American and European social media users spreading fictional political narratives in support of the Syrian regime; and Facebook offering a platform for a harassment campaign by Buddhist ultra-nationalists in Myanmar that led to the killing of thousands of Muslims. These are just some of the examples that demonstrate the dangerous effects of the Internet-driven global diffusion of disinformation and misinformation. Grounded on a theoretical framework yet written in an engaging and accessible way, this timely book is a valuable resource for students, researchers, policymakers and citizens concerned with the impact of social media on politics.


Truth Claims in a Post-Truth World

Truth Claims in a Post-Truth World

Author: Erkan Ali

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-08-18

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 1000933636

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Drawing on debates from a multi-disciplinary perspective, this book examines what it means to offer a genuine sociological critique of religious faith, illiberalism and anti-secularism from a macro perspective. Arguing that as a discipline concerned with real issues in the social world, sociology should be at the forefront of any analysis of religious power and legitimacy, the author contends that much religious faith is fundamentally incompatible with any twenty-first-century society that seeks inclusive, utilitarian and humanistic principles as its goals. With an emphasis on sociology, the effects of organised religion’s overall decline in modern Western contexts are explored, while the troubling re-emergence or persistence of faith-based and other non-evidentiary perspectives is also discussed via debates around identity politics, postmodernism and multiculturalism. Through an analysis of the rise of irrational thinking in our politics and our entire social and cultural fabric, the book moves to conclude that religious beliefs and other forms of dogmatism are underpinned by powerful, influential and potentially dangerous ideological structures at various levels of society and that viable, secular alternatives to faith teachings ought to be nurtured in their place. A critique of religion that advances modern, secular humanistic thought, Truth Claims in a Post-Truth World will appeal to scholars of sociology, social theory and philosophy with interests in religion, political thought, ethics and civil society.


The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology

The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology

Author: Elisabetta Costa

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-09-30

Total Pages: 780

ISBN-13: 1000643158

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The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology provides a broad overview of the widening and flourishing area of media anthropology, and outlines key themes, debates, and emerging directions. The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology draws together the work of scholars from across the globe, with rich ethnographic studies that address a wide range of media practices and forms. Comprising 41 chapters by a team of international contributors, the Companion is divided into three parts: Histories Approaches Thematic Considerations. The chapters offer wide-ranging explorations of how forms of mediation influence communication, social relationships, cultural practices, participation, and social change, as well as production and access to information and knowledge. This volume considers new developments, and highlights the ways in which anthropology can contribute to the study of the human condition and the social processes in which media are entangled. This is an indispensable teaching resource for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students and an essential text for scholars working across the areas that media anthropology engages with, including anthropology, sociology, media and cultural studies, internet and communication studies, and science and technology studies.


The Truth Society

The Truth Society

Author: Noelle Molé Liston

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-11-15

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 150175081X

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Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving. With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the "post-truth" world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.


Toxic Truths

Toxic Truths

Author: Thom Davies

Publisher:

Published: 2020-06-15

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 9781526137029

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Post-truth politics have threatened science itself. Drawing on case studies from around the world, Toxic Truths examines enduring issues and new challenges for tackling environmental injustice in a post-truth age.


Evaluation in the Post-Truth World

Evaluation in the Post-Truth World

Author: Mita Marra

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2024-04-16

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1040019390

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Evaluation in the Post-Truth World explores the relationship between the nature of evaluative knowledge, the increasing demand in decision-making for evaluation and other forms of research evidence, and the post-truth phenomena of antiscience sentiments combined with illiberal tendencies of the present day. Rather than offer a checklist on how to deal with post-truth, the experts found herein wish to raise awareness and reflection throughout policy circles on the factors that influence our assessment and policy-related work in such a challenging environment. Journeying alongside the editor and contributors, readers benefit from three guiding questions to help identify specific challenges but tools to deal with such challenges: How are policy problems conceptualized in the current political climate? What is the relationship between expertise and decision-making in today’s political circumstances? How complex has evaluation become as a social practice? Evaluation in the Post-Truth World will benefit evaluation practitioners at the program and project levels, as well as policy analysts and scholars interested in applications of evaluation in the public policy domain. Chapters 6, and 11 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons [Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND)] 4.0 license.