Donald Trump’s Political Reality: The Politics of Fakery and the Fakery of Politics

Description

This workshop on politics in the time of Donald Trump’s presidency is organized by PhD students from the Lisbon Consortium. The aim is to think and discuss the notion of an emerging political field that can perhaps be characterized by the prevalence of claims of inauthenticity, fakeness, lies, semblance, virtuality and error. Claims of “Fake News” are constantly made by different agencies within the Trump administration and by the president himself as well. This notion of fakeness, often comes to stand for a supposed political strategy by Trump’s opponents, suggestive of a binary between the ‘real,’ ‘truthful,’ and ‘honest,’ on the one hand, and a supposed rhetorico-political strategy of discrediting this ‘truth’ on the other. ‘The media’ is turned into the political opponent, suggesting that unmediated, direct, and straight-forward speech by Trump – ironically, often by means of his Twitter account – provides ‘the people’ with a truth that is less fake, less political, and more pure.

Period	30 Apr 2018
Event type	Workshop
Location	Lisbon, PortugalShow on map