Friday, April 09, 2021

Critical Disinformation Studies

Alice Marwick, Rachel Kuo, Shanice Jones Cameron and Moira Weigel have created a syllabus for Critical Disinformation Studies "as a provocation to disinformation researchers to rethink many of the assumptions of our nascent field". It is published by The Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life (CITAP) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The syllabus has 13 sections, with a topic/issue or an example for each section, in each case having a paragraph outlining the theme and some readings. The authors note that it is focused on a United States perspective, and also I would say that the disciplinary perspective is that of media literacy and communications (rather than information science and information literacy). Thus, as well as the sections making an interesting focus for discussion in themselves, it would also be interesting to reframe the syllabus to different national/cultural contexts and different disciplinary contexts. The authors themselves say that they "make this offering as a means to encourage ongoing critical and multi-faceted reflections of power and history in the study of disinformation." Go to https://citap.unc.edu/research/critical-disinfo
Photo by Sheila Webber: celandine and violet, March 2021

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