The anti-pedagogy of authoritarian discourses: Digital social media in the age of neo-fascism
Biographical Sketch
Panayota Gounari is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Applied Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published extensively on the politics of language, the discourses of neoliberalism, language policy, and critical pedagogy.Her most recent books include Liberatory and Critical Education in Greece: Historical Trajectories and Perspectives(co-authored), and A Reader in Critical Pedagogy. She can be reached at panagiota.gounari@umb.edu.
Type of Presentation
Individual presentation
Brief Description of Presentation
Social media have been hailed as either emancipatory tools contributing to a more participatory democracy, creating instant awareness about different social issues, a new public space of sorts (see “Arab Spring” and the “Occupy” movement) or just another tool for control and containment, a “profoundly depoliticizing” arena that fetishizes technology leading to a “disavowal of a more fundamental political disempowerment or castration” (Dean 2005). In the context of rising authoritarianism and right-wing populism, in this presentation I am using data from social media to examine them in two ways: a) as a new kind of symbolic “machine”, an effective political instrument that, in the context of advanced capitalism, both dehumanizes politics and struggles, and absolves people from the guilt of inertia and b) as a site of public pedagogy that has the force to distort knowledge, create common sense discourses and produce and legitimize new knowledge as information.
Abstract of Proposal
The rise of right-wing populism and neo-fascism worldwide is creating a dystopian reality for millions of people. From the significant electoral gains of Europe’s nationalist and far-right parties, to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro’s recent electoral victory in Brazil, social media have been serving as the ideal medium for populist parties and their leaders since they are marketed as “non-hierarchical” and “democratic.” They constitute an alternative to the mainstream media, which many supporters of populist parties strongly distrust. The perception is that since everybody contributes, “the content is generated by us – the honest, hard-working, ordinary citizens – exactly those people who the populists are defending. Indeed, populist parties are far less likely to trust mainstream media sources than the typical citizen” (Bartlett cited in Kreis 2017, 4). Both the upsurge of right-wing populist parties, as well as the promotion and normalization of their respective agendas and narratives has been possible partially through the increased mediatization. In this presentation I am examining authoritarian and populist discourses emerging in social media as a type of public anti-pedagogyand outline their specific characteristics. I look at how thecurrent brand of authoritarian, corporate capitalism uses social media as a large dissemination platform that plays a fundamental anti-pedagogical role and I propose ideas for critically intervening.
Location
Session 2B (Summit, Double Tree)
Start Date
2-22-2019 1:20 PM
End Date
2-22-2019 2:50 PM
Recommended Citation
Gounari, Panayota, "The anti-pedagogy of authoritarian discourses: Digital social media in the age of neo-fascism" (2019). International Critical Media Literacy Conference. 12.
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/criticalmedialiteracy/2019/2019/12
The anti-pedagogy of authoritarian discourses: Digital social media in the age of neo-fascism
Session 2B (Summit, Double Tree)
The rise of right-wing populism and neo-fascism worldwide is creating a dystopian reality for millions of people. From the significant electoral gains of Europe’s nationalist and far-right parties, to Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro’s recent electoral victory in Brazil, social media have been serving as the ideal medium for populist parties and their leaders since they are marketed as “non-hierarchical” and “democratic.” They constitute an alternative to the mainstream media, which many supporters of populist parties strongly distrust. The perception is that since everybody contributes, “the content is generated by us – the honest, hard-working, ordinary citizens – exactly those people who the populists are defending. Indeed, populist parties are far less likely to trust mainstream media sources than the typical citizen” (Bartlett cited in Kreis 2017, 4). Both the upsurge of right-wing populist parties, as well as the promotion and normalization of their respective agendas and narratives has been possible partially through the increased mediatization. In this presentation I am examining authoritarian and populist discourses emerging in social media as a type of public anti-pedagogyand outline their specific characteristics. I look at how thecurrent brand of authoritarian, corporate capitalism uses social media as a large dissemination platform that plays a fundamental anti-pedagogical role and I propose ideas for critically intervening.
