On May 25th 2022, media and communication scholars met at Sciences Po in Paris for a pre-conference before the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) to discuss the question, “What comes after disinformation studies?”
Today, CITAP is proud to release a special issue of our Bulletin of Technology & Public Life with eleven new pieces exploring answers to this question from many angles. As the collection shows, it may be time for disinformation studies to fade away—or become something new.
Chris Anderson and Théophile Lenoir note in their introductory essay,
“The problem is twofold. First, disinformation studies has generally lacked analyses of power and interest… Second, the real problem underlying informational politics in many countries are powerful groups seeking to hold on to their political, social, economic, and cultural advantages in the face of increasingly powerful challenges to that power.”
This special issue takes up the question of “what comes after disinformation studies” from many angles.
Several pieces take on the “infocentric” nature of the current discussion to consider instead issues of style, distraction, ignorance, context, and state violence.
Another recurring theme is the importance of understanding disinformation in non-Western contexts, with pieces exploring disinformation in a Vietnamese context and information disorder across Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Senegal, and the Sahel.
Finally, these scholars grapple with how we define democracy in a world with disinformation, centering questions of power, moral claims, inequality, race and ethnicity, and conflict.
So, what does come after disinformation studies? Anderson and Lenoir offer a clear call to regulators and others seeking to build more just, resilient democracies:
“Technical solutions to political problems are bound to fail. Historical, structural, and political inequality—and especially race, ethnicity, and social difference—needs to be at the forefront of our understanding of politics and, indeed, disinformation.”
The full contents:
- Introduction: What Comes After Disinformation Studies by Théophile Lenoir and Chris Anderson
- Centering Identity and Morality in Disinformation Studies by Kirsten A. Eddy
- Authoritarian neoliberal statecraft and the political economy of mis/disinformation: Resituating Western-centric debates in a Vietnamese context by Sean Phelan and Nguyễn Yến Khanh
- What Is Disinformation to Democracy? by A.J. Bauer and Anthony Nadler
- The Power of News Style and the limits of technology: thinking being the ‘infocentric’ orientation of disinformation studies by Reece Peck
- Thinking for themselves: Examining the reactionary right’s bootstraps epistemology by Cindy Ma
- From disinformation to speculation: The pitch, the playbook & the buy-in by Fenwick McKelvey, Ganael Langlois, and Greg Elmer
- “Where the Victor/Victim Bleeds”: State Violence and the Public Sphere by Roderic Crooks and Bryan Truitt
- The Brave New World(?) of Disinformation Research by Katerina Tsetsura
- Apocalypse Not: Disinformation through the lens of Ignorance Studies by Shaden Shabayek
- Don’t Look Up: Watch Your (Two) Step with a Bottom-up Approach to Disinformation Research by Jen Schradie
- “Factforward”: Foretelling the Future of Africa’s Information Disorder by Bruce Mutsvairo, Luca Bruls, Mirjam de Bruijn, and Kristin Skare Orgeret