Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media
From fake news to COVID-19 conspiracies, debates about truth claims have become more prominent during the past decade. Taking a global, comparative perspective, the minor Disinformation and Strategic Communication in Global Media focuses on the broad spectrum of contested narratives subsumed under the term ‘Truth Wars’.
The programme is designed to highlight both the global spread of media messages and formats, and the interaction between transnational and regional forms of disinformation and strategic communication as embedded in local settings, political economies, and platforms. To this end, the programme offers two mandatory semester-long core courses, which students combine with one regional elective in each study block.
Students of this minor will learn to discern between different forms of contested narratives and analyze the production and spread of disinformation from various global and theoretical perspectives. They will enhance their media and critical reading skills by becoming acquainted with strategies to verify news items and deconstruct discourses on ‘fake news’. As such, they will be able to analyze the rhetorical, affective, and situated meanings and uses of terms such as ‘disinformation’ or ‘post-truth’ – concepts that are themselves often weaponized and impossible to define without considering their cultural context.