How to face denialism and criticism of education in times of right-wing populism?

Abstract

Nowadays, the growth of right-wing populism in the world has been significant, associated to a greater or lesser extent with Nazi-fascist and ultra-conservative movements. Much of the discourse disseminated by these groups involves attacks on education and science, fostering science denialism and devaluing the public character of schools and universities with the use of fake news, in a context that many call post-truth. As a way of antagonizing such movements, the defense of a New Enlightenment has been growing by valuing science and knowledge in school and society and rejecting discourses of difference and post-structural register. Based on Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory, in dialogue with Derridean deconstruction, we argue for another approach to this context, in a way that allows us to question deleterious effects (anti-life, anti-democracy and anti-social justice) of far-right populism, without assuming the need to return to an Enlightenment metanarrative or to any universalist record about the truth of science and knowledge. We start from the notions of antagonism, dislocation, and populism in Laclau and Mouffe and, then, referenced in a vision of knowledge and science submitted to contexts, power and affects, we problematize the emergence of the post-truth context in times of right-wing populism in Brazil, as well as the usual registers of true and false associated with fake news. We defend as more urgent the production of dislocations in right-wing populist discourses, through hyperpoliticization and the questioning of rationality in politics, especially in education.