Post-truth as difficult knowledge: fostering affective solidarity in anti-racist education

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to conversations around difficult knowledge in pedagogy by (a) investigating how post-truth claims about issues of race and racism may constitute forms of difficult knowledge, and (b) proposing that fostering ‘affective solidarity’ can constitute a productive pedagogical response to post-truth claims, because it moves beyond mere rejection of the epistemological grounding of those claims. It is argued that if educators are to consider strategic and productive ways of confronting the multiple challenges of post-truth as difficult knowledge in the classroom, then evidentiary epistemologies will not be enough. Educators would do well to diversify their tools of addressing post-truth claims by exploring how a pedagogical framework grounded in fostering affective solidarity can reinvent affective relations with others, thus creating new avenues of knowledge-making beyond the narrow epistemic framing of post-truth claims.

KEYWORDS:

• Post-truth
• difficult knowledge
• affective solidarity
• anti-racist education

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. ‘I am the least racist person there is anywhere in the world,’ as Trump said in the summer of 2019 in response to a reporter’s question if he was bothered that ‘more and more people’ were calling him racist.