Beyond Post-Truth: Media Landscapes in the "Age of Insecurity"
St. Petersburg, 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
Organisers: Daria Petushkova and Jan Surman in cooperation with Friedrich Cain, Dietlind Hüchtker, Bernhard Kleeberg and Ilya Kalinin
Funded by: IGITI, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow /// 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 (chair for "Allgemeiner Gesellschaftsvergleich")
Contact: beyondposttruth@gmail.com
Contributors: Armen Aramyan, Stef Aupers, Aleksander Bikbov, Polina Boyarshinova, Konstantin Gabov, Diego Han, Nikita Khokhlov, Darya Khokhlova, Bernhard Kleeberg, Philipp Kohl, Andreas Langenohl, Zhanna Mylogorodska, Olga Savinskaya, Sophie Schmähig, Philipp Smirnov, Olga Solovyeva, Ilya Yablokov, Greg Yudin, Alexander Zhigaylov
Programme | Conference Homepage | CfP
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 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 truth," or "truth" as categories in current social, cultural, medial, legal, political and philosophical, discourse, our conference intends to look at the construction of these entities and practices connected with their use in the current information regime. While the focus of our conference will be Russian-language media, it is our intention to place them within the recent alterations of international media and not particularising it, preferably by comparative approaches. We inquire into changes that affected “truth figures” and “truth scenes” after 1989 and after the collapse of the bipolar world order, situating local particularity within the global trends. We are particularly interested in discussing the conceptual frameworks with which the international situation can be analysed beyond the simplifying rhetorical figures like "true," "fake," "propaganda" etc. By engaging into discussion with actors of conventional and new media we also want to have a glance behind the practices of creating information and engage with non-academic discourses.