%0 Journal Article
%T Productive Forces of Post
%A Anna Montana
%A David Lee Carlson
%A Mirka Koro-Ljungberg
%J Qualitative Inquiry
%@ 1552-7565
%D 2019
%R 10.1177/1077800418806595
%X Despite efforts to re-establish epistemological order, a litany of fake websites, media misrepresentation, ¡°rumor bombs,¡± hoaxes, fake news, plagiarisms, and fabricated subjects document the emergence of a post-truth era. Increasing amount of scholarship is shared and distributed in media and thus the truth-value of (qualitative) inquiry also depends on the general discourses and practices operating in this contemporary post-truth era. Although critical thought is prized as the vehicle for advancing understandings, the scholarly literature does little to critically deconstruct the nature of post-truth(s) or question post-truth assumptions, to arrive at alternative conclusions and productive possibilities of our post-truth era. Following many poststructuralist thinkers, we then seek a deconstructive approach that first exposes and then subverts our implicit assumptions and dominant ways of thinking about truth, un-truth, and post-truth. In particular, we first consider broad conditions that shaped post-truth, while focusing on social media as a means and an ends to our obsession over ¡°truth.¡± To destabilize post-truth assumptions, we then introduce mental comfort stories and critically question whether a pre-truth world ever existed. Next we discuss limitations of truth-regimes, academia, ¡°truth¡± carnivals, and truth telling. Finally, we consider heterotopic spaces, such as social media, in leveraging onto-epistemological possibilities of post-truth era. To speak to the methodological audiences more broadly we call for a different space for (non)methodologies, theories, subjects, and objects in parallel flux with the complex, unpredictable, and increasingly dense post-truth world we live in
%K post-truth
%K Academia
%K qualitative inquiry
%K methodology
%K social media
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1077800418806595