From realism to post truth? News, museums and higher education against fake news and fact resistance

Recently, the problem with fake news, fact resistance and the growing digital, global circulation of disinformation have caused debates and worries, and posed a challenge for several institutions of knowledge in society. In this article, we discuss how the news industry, museums and higher education confront the challenges of the ‘post truth’ era. We can see a mobilization by these institutions in Sweden: The news industry has initiated so-called fact checking sites, the major museums create exhibitions about false news and educate youth in digital literacy and many universities have launched initiatives to legitimize scientific knowledge production, thereby safeguarding professional authority. However, these initiatives are faced with dilemmas concerning how concepts of knowledge, truth and facts are negotiated and understood. This article discusses such epistemological issues in general, and focuses in particular on the risk of falling into the trap of so called neorigorism.

Racist hate crimes have increased in Sweden since 2006 when reports started, but they have also been followed by a variety of protests. This article analyzes the so-called #HijabUppropet (#HijabOutcry), a call initiated by Muslim feminist activists in response to a racist attack on a Muslim woman, which encouraged all "sisters" in Sweden to temporarily veil themselves in solidarity. The hijab outcry was widely heard and both celebrated and debated. Drawing on postcolonial feminist theory, this article shows how the initial protest against racism was partly reduced to a matter of being for or against the veil and the right to choose. Despite intentions to normalize the veil, the flow of comments and pictures on social media turned veils into examples of odd, exotic, and beautiful elements that enrich Swedish culture. The white secular subject was again reinstalled as the ideal and it seemed as though Muslim women could not pass as agents of Swedish feminist solidarity. Yet, at the same time, the debate in the aftermath of the hijab outcry had the effect of initiating an uneasy feeling of not belonging among white non-Muslim participators. This was a feeling that might affect future acts of solidarity—confronting a Swedish context of secular pride and whiteness—where Muslim women must struggle to be recognized as political subjects.

The term postcolonialism has been applied to signal a historical condition, an era, and also, perhaps most commonly, to describe critical perspectives or theories. When postcolonialism signals a critical theory, or perspective, it has come to mean interrogations of the knowledge production of the West. At the center of the analysis is a critique of how the Western self has been constructed, and how Western institutions have been producing knowledge about what they perceive to be other places, and other peoples, thereby constructing the center and the margins. In his groundbreaking work Orientalism, literary theorist Edward Said explores how the Western project of civilization, modernization, progress, and enlightenment is built upon the premise that there is some other (the Oriental) that is seen as the opposite. Orientalism can be characterized as a hegemonic discourse that builds upon the idea that European culture and identity are superior to all others. Postcolonial scholars scrutinize colonial discourses and decolonizing projects all over the world. Scholars like Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak have developed the work of Orientalism in various ways, by deconstructing identity and introducing class, gender, and global capitalism into the analysis of colonial discourse.

Analysing interviews with diversity practitioners at three Swedish universities, this article explores how diversity is deployed and the ways in which the articulations of practitioners might contribute to politicising issues of ethnicity and race. In the post-political era of New Public Management, audit technologies, quantification and bureaucratisation often render diversity apolitical, and deprive it of its political nature. These processes of depoliticisation tend to downplay political conflicts and ignore or even reinforce social hierarchies such as those based on norms of whiteness and middle-class masculinity. Paradoxically, in this interview study, it is shown how seemingly neutral, apolitical procedures such as mapping, counting and producing statistics led to debates that revealed underlying antagonisms, and opened up a space for rearticulating diversity that could provide a destabilisation of the whiteness of academia.

Gender equality workers have to perform a balancing act between feminist ideals for change and neo-liberal management trends. So-called audit discourses have gradually been introduced into Swedish universities, in line with an enterprise model. In this new context, the aim of our article is to investigate how gender equality workers at universities articulate gender equality and possibilities for change. What are their visions and strategies for achieving gender equality? This article is based on interviews with gender equality workers at three Swedish universities and explores how the legitimate gender equality worker is constructed. We found that there is a lack of visionary thinking among gender equality workers, which manifests itself in a sense that the distinction between visions and strategies has collapsed and technologies like auditing have become the vision. It seems that, whilst navigating between liberal feminist discourses and an increasingly neo-liberal setting, two positions are available for gender equality workers. The first is the "administrator", who asks for more tools and monitoring of gender equality, in order for the work to become more efficient and legitimate. The second position, the "critical cynic", makes scepticism and resistance to the increasing bureaucratization of gender equality work possible, but lacks alternative visions and strategies. Gender equality initiatives have thus become increasingly embedded in auditing technologies, and the possibilities for articulating alternatives or visionary ideals, beyond liberal values of anti-discrimination, seem limited.