[Air-L] Critical Disinformation Studies Syllabus

[Sarah Ann Oates]

My student found this yesterday and shared. It is AMAZING. Thank you so
much for doing this -- it really helps the field!

Sarah Oates
Pronoun: she/her

Professor and Senior Scholar
Philip Merrill College of Journalism
iSchool Affiliate Professor
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20457
Email: soates at umd.edu
Phone: 301 455 2332
www.media-politics.com
Twitter: @media_politics

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On Fri, Mar 26, 2021 at 9:31 AM Alice E. Marwick <amarwick at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
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