The Nature of Facts: An Exploration of Fake News, Librarians and Affective Labor

Fake news is now big news. Conferences, investigative reports, scientific studies, journals and books have been convened, commissioned and written attempting to understand and engage with the influence and impact of fake news. In higher education, librarians have been heavily involved with discussions of fake news and various efforts to engage with it. Academic librarians offer a rich group to study in response to fake news due to their involvement with teaching and promoting information literacy.

This presentation will examine fake news following three intertwined threads. The first thread is fake news as a rhetorical/historical situation, the second thread is fake news as affective labor, focusing largely on responding to fake news, and third thread is a critical response to fake news. These threads have been chosen because of their impact in understanding how calling for more evaluatory tools or methods, such as appeals to information literacy, fails to understand the affective nature of fake news. This presentation will argue evaluation alone is insufficient to address issues of fake news due to how fake news is situated in “…an affect of the circulation between objects and signs…” (Ahmed 2010)

Fake news as an idea is rich with historical|rhetorical situations. The first thread will engage the sense-making of rhetorical theory, drawing from print history and Internet history to understand the long running engagement with fake news for rhetorical and historical context. This context is helpful to understand the intertwining with the second thread in addressing questions and issues of labor. Librarians have answered the rallying cry across academic librarianship to “fight fake news”, directly related to teaching information literacy, producing a wide variety of materials and approaches. In this metaphor “fighting fake news” adds the dimension of warrior to the librarian’s role. As librarians often see themselves as socially active this perception fits how librarians view

the impact of their labor. However, many of these tools assume the reader is proceeding from the same rhetorical and affective place and thus fails to engage the significant affective appeal of fake news for those who connect with its message(s).

Understanding context and labor links to the third thread of critical pedagogy which is rich with supportive connections to the other two threads. Building from Henri Giroux’s observation “pedagogy is present whenever knowledge is produced” it is essential to understand that fake news is also pedagogical. Critical pedagogies must be developed in response and in proximity to students, focusing on the classroom and university settings.

Seeing “pedagogy [as] a practice of freedom” (Giroux 2011) provides a space to explore how critical pedagogies might engage the complexities of affective proximities and contexts linked to fake news.

Drawing upon the three threads of rhetoric, affective labor and critical pedagogy, this presentation offers suggestions for better understanding fake news as an embedded, affective, socially and historically situated continuation and provide some ways of engaging with the practices and pedagogies of fake news in the present. This presentation draws from a growing body of literature connecting librarianship and affect theory, critical pedagogy, sociology, print history and personal narrative. Of particular interest to this stream, this presentation will also draw from ACRL’s Framework for Information Literacy which has its basis in threshold concepts of learning; offering information literacy as a series of frames or thresholds.