Covid-19, Knowledge Production and the (Un)Making of Truths and Fakes

Bibliographic Data

ID2173280
AuthorsGeorge Ogola (0000-0002-4513-4550, University of Lancashire, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume33
Issue3
Pages305-311
Publication date2021-07-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of African Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1369-6815 • E-ISSN: 1469-9346
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13696815.2021.1897536
OpenAlexW3152934553
LanguageEN
Citations received7
References cited5

The Covid-19 pandemic is arguably one of the most disruptive phenomena of our time. It has threatened and destabilised the normative, it has stoked fear and anxiety, and laid bare the fragility of our systems of governance, of medical science and the immanent tensions within our knowledge systems. The pandemic has provoked a fundamental collision of these systems, leaving in its wake confusion as we struggle over meaning; the production of meaning, its husbandry and its political instrumentalization as a tool for domination and resistance. This article explores the emerging reconfiguration of the certainty about what is authentic or the truth, and of the un/certainty of the fake and fakery as alternative or complementary sites of truth(s). It argues that we are now faced with a complex and layered contestation over who gets to define the truth and the fake, and under what terms. This conversation is deeply insurrectional for it invites the whole world, centres and margins alike, to confront how political, cultural, economic and social values and structures of knowledge production are implicated in the making and unmaking of the authentic, of truth as well as of the fake

Certainty · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Meaning (existential · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts · Philosophy

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Open DOIOpen Access