Three -Reading in a post-truth paradigm
An excerpt from my new book:
“As the post-truth paradigm gathers influence in education policy and practice, it is crucial for critical literacy, as a broad project, to find ways to engage with the post-truth appeal to emotion. Post-truth is defined by the Oxford Dictionary (2016) as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” In recent years, we have seen a multitude of examples in the media of appeals to emotion that go on to shape public opinion more than facts do. For example, “Large groups of refugees have broken away from the controversial immigration caravan winding its way through Mexico, and made a dash for the US border” (News Corp Australia, 2018). Language such as “large groups”, “broken away”, “controversial”, “winding its way”, and “made a dash” all attempt to summon emotional responses to whip up fear but they don’t provide actual facts. These appeals are not new media phenomena but such post-truth appeals now have more ubiquitous, more immediate and more amplified consequences than ever before due to technological capabilities around information dissemination, and due to the pervasive discourse of fear of “the other” (Said, 1978). Engaging with emotion is a political act that critical literacy needs to seriously facilitate to show how post-truth appeals to emotion work on us” (Alford, 2021, p. 105).
Young people inhabiting the online space while still learning English will need assistance to interrogate such language choices to see how they are being positioned to accept certain ideas, for example, anti-vaccination. They also benefit from doing similar explorations in their home languages.
This is not to say that emotion and affect do not have a place in becoming critically literate. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to identify how emotions are produced and circulated as orienting devices (Ahmed, 2004) and what we do with/act on emotions in a material sense. It can be used to explore connections between feelings and cognition, for example, in film studies, as demonstrated by Lewis and Tierney (2013). I’m thinking, too, of the film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s brilliant “Never Let Me Go” - the heart breaking, dystopian tale of children who are raised, unaware, to have their organs harvested so others can live longer. Its appeal to emotion can be harnessed to explore concepts relating to the nature of humanity; our relationships with one another; our reasons for being.
The literature on affect and emotion and critical literacy has been growing in recent years and is well worth checking out - e.g.,
Anwarrudin, S. (2015). Why critical literacy should turn to ‘the affective turn’: making a case for critical affective literacy. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 37 (3), 381-396.
Lewis, C. (2014). Affective and global ecologies: New directions for critical literacy. In J. Zacher Pandya & J. Ávila (Eds.) Moving critical literacies forward: A new look at praxis across contexts (pp. 187-193). New York, NY: Routledge.
Lewis, C. & Tierney, J. D. (2013). Mobilizing emotion in an urban classroom: Producing identities and transforming signs in a race-related discussion. Linguistics and Education, 23, 289-304.