Resisting Post-Truth Politics as Epistemicide: Learning from Trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian Lived Experiences

Abstract

Building upon Galpin and Vernon’s 2023 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations (BJPIR) piece, this article extends the notion of post-truth politics as discursive violence to post-truth politics as epistemicide in order to make sense of global crises in 2024. Reflecting on this political moment, it highlights the ways in which trans*, Indigenous American and Palestinian communities are some of those who have been particularly targeted by the eliminationist logics that underpin Western modernity. What is new, it notes, is the existence of social media and new media as components of the hybrid media system, which both facilitate subaltern agency and reproduce oppressive colonial logics and violence. Interrogating attempts to erase the aforementioned communities at the ontological level, both in body and in law, the article aims to learn from the ways in which these groups have shared knowledge from their lived experiences and ways of being, resisting a political context that attempts to deny their existence. Studying power/resistance in relation to the hybrid media system, we reflect on possibilities for change in this distinctly cataclysmic global political moment.