Rhetoric of Contemporary Politics

From conspiracy theories and climate change denial, to ‘fake news’ and targeted disinformation campaigns, controversies about matters of fact animate politics today. Yet debunking and fact-checking alone do not seem adequate to the task. This course explores the idea that America's is a ‘post-truth politics’.

Together we will examine lying, skepticism, paranoia, mistrust, and expertise in politics today and the recent past. Alongside scholarly texts and essays, we will read and watch films on conspiracy narratives, analyze their rhetorical strategies, and evaluate the efficacy of attempts to debunk them. We will also investigate the rhetoric of climate-change denial as well as activist campaigns in opposition. The next approach of the course is to explore the effects different media forms have on ‘post-truth politics’; to that end, students will write about an episode of a Twitter controversy, discuss impeachment hearings as covered by different news channels, research political candidates’ social media campaigns, and assess efforts to regulate platforms like Facebook to protect against disinformation. We will then draw on cases from different countries to develop a comparative approach to these problems.