[Air-L] Critical Disinformation Studies Syllabus

[Alice E. Marwick]

Hi all,

Today I’m excited to announce the Critical Disinformation Studies syllabus,
a collective effort to make disinformation research more contextual,
historical, and power-oriented.

The syllabus is hosted at https://citap.unc.edu/research/critical-disinfo/

The goal of the syllabus is to push back on narratives of disinformation
that begin with the 2016 US presidential election and focus on the role of
social media platforms in spreading and generating false content. At their
worst, these narratives imply that in the past, everyone shared the same
sense of what was true and what was false; that this collective
understanding was reinforced by legacy media like newspapers and TV news;
and that “fake news,” disinformation, and inauthentic online behavior are
responsible for a global far-right shift to populism exemplified by Brexit
and the Trump presidency. None of these assumptions hold up to scrutiny.

At CITAP, we take a critical approach to research on platforms, politics,
and information which incorporates history, inequality, power, and culture.
To demonstrate how these principles play out in practice, we created a
Critical Disinformation Studies syllabus as a provocation to disinformation
researchers to rethink many of the assumptions of our nascent field. While
the syllabus is fully-functional as is—it could be implemented in its
current form for a graduate level seminar—it is also an essay in syllabus
form. We draw from a very broad range of scholarship, much which falls
outside of conventional studies of “disinformation,” to expand our
understanding of what “counts” as disinformation. The syllabus also draws
from historical case studies - Japanese incarceration, the Welfare Queen,
the Central Park 5, Black liberation, AIDS/HIV - to examine how the state,
the media, and the political establishment regularly use disinformation to
reinforce inequality.

My co-authors on this project are Rachel Kuo, Shanice Cameron, and Moira
Weigel. The syllabus is supported by CITAP. And our thanks go out to the
many scholars whose work inspired us to bring this project to life.

Warmly

Alice

Alice E. Marwick, PhD (she/her)
Associate Professor, Department of Communication
Principal Researcher, Center for Information, Technology and Public Life
(CITAP)
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
amarwick at gmail.com
http://www.tiara.org
http://citap.unc.edu