Call for papers: "Beyond Post-Truth: Media Landscapes in the 'Age of Insecurity'"
Date: 3-4 June 2019
Venue: Center for Study of Civil Society and Human Rights, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences (Smolny College) of St.Petersburg State University, 58-60 Galernaya St., St.Petersburg, 190000, Russia
Organised by: Daria Petushkova and Jan Surman in cooperation with Ilya Kalinin, Friedrich Cain, Dietlind Hüchtker and Bernhard Kleeberg.
In cooperation with
- Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities, National Research University Higher School of Economics
- Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, GWZO, Leipzig
- Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies, University of Erfurt
- Justus-Liebig-University Gießen
Call for papers
Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented rise of a new category of description within the world of media and information. Fake news and fake facts, post-truth and post-politics, have started to govern the medial and social life, unmistakably attracting also academic attention. At the same time they give an illusion as if true news and true facts, truth and politics, were a some kind of fixed objects before the rise of populism and authoritarian regimes in East and West. This creates a narrative of a current informational insecurity, which follows an (alleged) age of informational clarity. How simplifying this narrative might be, and how diverting the gaze from other, often more crucial changes in local and global media landscapes (like changes of attention economy following the acceleration of information and the multiplication of truth makers), which are often closely interconnected with it, “fakeness” of the “post” era, or the “post-truth-regime”, becomes to be the reality we live by.
Taking “fake”, “post or “truth” as categories in current social, cultural, medial, legal, political and philosophical, discourse, our conference intends precisely to look at the construction of these entities and practices connected with their use in the current information regime.
With the focus on Russian-language media, it is our intention to place them within the recent global alterations of media landscape and not particularizing it, preferably by comparative approaches. We are thus inviting papers inquiring into changes that affected “truth figures” and “truth scenes” after 1989 and the collapse of the bipolar world order, that situate local particularity within global trends. We are particularly interested in discussing the conceptual frameworks with which the Russian and international situation can be analyzed beyond the simplifying rhetorical figures like “true”, “fake”, “propaganda” etc.
Please send us short proposals (up to 300 words) by 3 March 2019 along with a CV or a link to your online CV. The organisers will seek to reimburse expenditures for travel and accommodation. Please indicate in your application if you would need reimbursement.
Please direct proposals and questions to beyondposttruth@gmail.com