Civic reasoning through paranoid and reparative reading: Addressing conspiracy theories within racialized and queer publics

ABSTRACT

When classrooms fail to provide racially marginalized students with frameworks that explain their daily experiences, sometimes students turn to conspiracy theories, however inaccurate. This article links marginalized students’ critiques of society and paranoid readings of the world with civic reasoning. Through queer and critical race theory, this article offers practices within civics classrooms to address marginalized students’ turns to conspiracy theories, rethinking civic reasoning from students’ paranoid positionalities as targets of systemic oppression. These practices stem from my teaching a twelfth-grade civics course which centered conspiracy theories, and students’ distrust of the government and media. Recommendations for practice include providing terminology and documentation of marginalization; defining the line between conspiracy and conspiracy theory, science and pseudoscience; embracing fallibility as analytic virtue; and repairing students’ relationships to science and sources.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional resources

1. Race - The power of an illusion. (n.d.). Retrieved December 14, 2020, from https://www.pbs.org/race/000_General/000_00-Home.htm

This PBS website provides supplemental curricular materials for the documentary, Race—The Power of an Illusion, produced by California Newsreel. This website and documentary examine the social construction of race, through science, law, and social forces.

2. Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing Corporation.

This book reveals the history of segregation in the US as a direct result of government policy and actions at the federal, state, and local levels.

3. Sagan, C. (1995). The demon haunted world: Science as a candle in the dark. Ballantine Books.

This book helps frame the line between science and pseudoscience, helping to articulate and illustrate the importance of fallibility within how scientists approach evidence and draw conclusions based on evidence.