“…Previous research has also documented that anti-immigrant discourse is a site of propaganda and misinformation or fabrication (Puschmann et al 2016). These narratives are not intended to be coherent (e.g., the oft-cited laziness of migrants while they are accused of taking Americans’ jobs) and they are counter facts (Downing and Husband 2005; Ho and Cavanaugh 2019). These narratives have multiple functions, one of which is to reproduce dominant meanings over time and across contexts (Mbembe 2006).…”
Section: Empirical Evidence Of Immigrant Discourse In Social Mediamentioning
Undocumented individuals in U.S. society have been barred from access to federal economic relief during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Increased visibility of the vulnerability of undocumented individuals may provide a window of opportunity for inclusive policies. On the contrary, previous research about pro-immigrant sentiment shows that supporters of undocumented migrants advocate for them by using discourse that ultimately reifies their exclusion. The current study uses Twitter data collected from March to July 2020 to examine public discourse on undocumented immigrants during the pandemic. Our research question is: “How do Twitter users frame deservingness of undocumented immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic?” We find that: (1) relief for undocumented immigrants continues to be contingent even in times of crisis, (2) economic productivity is a prerequisite of deservingness, and (3) anti-immigrant frames that scapegoat immigrants are flexible to the political and public health conditions of a historical period. Implications for policy are discussed.
“…Previous research has also documented that anti-immigrant discourse is a site of propaganda and misinformation or fabrication (Puschmann et al 2016). These narratives are not intended to be coherent (e.g., the oft-cited laziness of migrants while they are accused of taking Americans’ jobs) and they are counter facts (Downing and Husband 2005; Ho and Cavanaugh 2019). These narratives have multiple functions, one of which is to reproduce dominant meanings over time and across contexts (Mbembe 2006).…”
Section: Empirical Evidence Of Immigrant Discourse In Social Mediamentioning
Undocumented individuals in U.S. society have been barred from access to federal economic relief during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Increased visibility of the vulnerability of undocumented individuals may provide a window of opportunity for inclusive policies. On the contrary, previous research about pro-immigrant sentiment shows that supporters of undocumented migrants advocate for them by using discourse that ultimately reifies their exclusion. The current study uses Twitter data collected from March to July 2020 to examine public discourse on undocumented immigrants during the pandemic. Our research question is: “How do Twitter users frame deservingness of undocumented immigrants during the COVID-19 pandemic?” We find that: (1) relief for undocumented immigrants continues to be contingent even in times of crisis, (2) economic productivity is a prerequisite of deservingness, and (3) anti-immigrant frames that scapegoat immigrants are flexible to the political and public health conditions of a historical period. Implications for policy are discussed.
“…The far right's deployment of disinformation, posttruths, and alternative facts to discredit climate change and demonize environmental regulations can influence public perceptions of energy dilemmas (Fraune and Knodt 2018). A growing number of social scientists express concern about how disinformation and posttruth draw on and appropriate common sense, “deconstruct[ing] truth” for pernicious ends (Asmolov 2018; Bennett and Livingston 2018; Ho 2018; Ho and Cavanaugh 2019, 164). Ho and Cavanaugh (2019, 164) explain: Long‐standing hierarchies and othering discourses fueled by precarity and resentment—helps to solidify the terrifying and increasingly “common sense” rhetoric that a permissive social order has allowed the formerly marginalized to take advantage of the system such that recipients of underserving handouts triumph over the normative and the hardworking.Rural or working‐class communities are often the imagined objects of populist appeals to common sense (Schneider et al 2016; Scoones et al 2018).…”
Section: Theoretical Framework: Energy Ethics Populist Rhetoric and Common Sensementioning
confidence: 99%
“…Recently, scholars have demonstrated how the affective and discursive power of neoliberal political rhetoric draws on and reproduces “common‐sense neoliberalism” (Hall and O'Shea 2013). One way hegemonic entities construct common sense is through the propagation of disinformation, posttruths, and alternative facts (Bennett and Livingston 2018; Fraune and Knodt 2018; Ho and Cavanaugh 2019; Knodt 2018).…”
Section: Hegemonic Narratives: Neoliberal Disinformation and The War On Coalmentioning
Recent scholarship indicates that populist rhetoric can profoundly shape commonsense understandings of global energy crises. While scholars often depict rural, working‐class communities as objects of right‐wing disinformation, posttruths, and alternative facts, how rural communities interpret or experience populist narratives is far from adequately understood. This research examines the recent coal industry recession in coal‐producing areas of Appalachian Kentucky, which contributed to ten thousand job losses since 2010. Amid the downturn, politicians and pro‐coal lobby groups riled the public by blaming the recession on an alleged “war on coal.” This article illustrates how neoliberal disinformation underpins war‐on‐coal narratives claiming that deregulating industry is the only way communities can save the industry and access economic well‐being. Drawing from qualitative interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis, I explore how war‐on‐coal disinformation becomes a commonsense explanation for many dealing with coal industry recession. While findings suggest that the war on coal “makes sense” for many living in coal‐mining communities, this does not indicate an indeterminate embrace of the industry or pro‐coal rhetoric. Communities negotiate commonsense narratives against complicated relationships with the industry, the many dangers of mining, and the challenges coal poses for alternative economic futures.
“…Not surprisingly, President Trump is the focus of many contributions. The editors (Ho and Cavanaugh 2019b, 160–64) explain the breadth of the problem with claims to truth—often a result of the universalizing of the unmarked “normative, Western white maleness”—when we want to preserve the insights of generations of work that have criticized this supposedly unpositioned reality in order “to destabilize presentist hierachies.” The question, as Ho and Cavanaugh point out, is how can we uphold these vital criticisms while also challenging the attacks on truth and fact where politicians and intellectuals attempt to “mobilize an avalanche of discontent” based on downward mobility? Besides drawing on Durkheim's discussion of social facts, Ho and Cavanaugh and others draw on Arendt's ([1967] 2000) renewal of a discussion of factual truths, which are those given to the plasticity of the (larger) public realm of plurality and debate, and thus are different from rational truths that live in a (more expert) world of science, mathematics, and philosophy.…”
Section: The Interplay Of Un/certaintymentioning
confidence: 99%
“…With these considerations, Ho and Cavanaugh (2019b, 165) ask very useful questions for continuing study: “What are the interactional modes, genres, and stances that enable fact, truth, and evidence to be so differently conceptualized and deployed with varying degrees of efficacy? Whence do they arise and from which longer historical lineages do they emerge?” In the collection, Debenport (2019, 201) explains how concealing and exposure are part of “knowledge‐production practices … [where] newly revealed, contested information is held up for evaluations of truth by experts and laypeople alike.” Dent (2019) describes the “autotelic” and self‐grounding process where authoritarian speech is vested in such speakers themselves and further gives the term “ludic authoritarianism” to the current manifestation of “ribald humor as well as grotesque realism in order to undercut the capacity of both humor and realism to bring about social change” (194).…”
This year, linguistic and semiotic anthropologists are responding in particular to multiple sources of uncertainty and discuss a growing sense of crisis and anxiety across several different settings and contexts. The politics of truth and the uncertainty about the future, as well as the shifts due to new communicative technologies, are well represented in this last year of publications. To consider this collective response, this article reviews published work in this field in three parts: (1) the semiotic interplay of certainty and uncertainty, especially in relation to evidence and agency; (2) the remediation of semiosis across media technologies and infrastructures; and (3) the semiosis of the state‐citizen divide. More generally, this review considers how linguistic/semiotic anthropologists are renewing foundational concepts and approaches at the same time as they express a strong desire to turn their expertise into a more public form of political agency. This process of renewal is leading to the emergence of new agendas. [language, semiotics, uncertainty, media, state]
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