Educational Philosophy and Theory

ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20

Postmodernism in post-truth times

Kevin Kester

To cite this article: Kevin Kester (2018) Postmodernism in post-truth times, Educational
Philosophy and Theory, 50:14, 1330-1331, DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2018.1461417

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1461417

Published online: 25 Nov 2018.

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EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY
2018, VOL. 50, NO. 14, 1330–1331
https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2018.1461417

Postmodernism in post-truth times

Kevin Kester
Department of Education, Keimyung University, Daegu, Korea

From my standpoint as a higher education peacebuilder in China and Korea, postmodernism is very
much not dead. It may have seemed so when Wang Ning (2013, p. 296) wrote, ‘postmodernism, as
a literary and cultural movement, came to an end some time ago not only in the West but also in
China’. But after the 2016 UK and US elections, the 2017 Twitter wars on the Korean Peninsula, and
the 19th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, postmodernity is clearly enjoying a
revival. This is because modernity too is very much alive. Postmodernity has been appropriated
in this post-truth era by nationalists and neo-colonialists alike to justify anti-intellectualism, eth-
nocentric education, and exclusionary politics that were at the very heart of the early modernist
agendas (Epstein, 1999).
If one accepts this, analysts must now make sense of a new age of opportunistic postmodernity,
where social life is dominated by ‘alt facts’ and ‘fake news’. Within this new regime of post-truth, repeti-
tion, hits, and clickbait equate fact, and scientific evidence is eschewed in the never-ending hyper-loop
of the apparent replicability of repetition. Hence, in this new world order science is but a tautology. For
some, postmodernism has always been ‘relativistic, nihilistic, and purposefully obfuscatory’ (St. Pierre,
2014, p. 5). Yet for others more sympathetic to postmodernism, the project has simply been distorted
to justify the sorts of practices—destructive capitalism, arrogance, and hyper-individualism—that post-
modernism initially sought to challenge.
Hence, postmodernity is now the modernist post-truth, the alt-postmodernity or the modernist
truths. The anti-thesis is becoming the thesis: knowledge has been replaced with unsubstantiated
opinion, and opinion has become ‘fact’. Epistemological gerrymandering is the new method of this
post-truth age, the tool of the new uncivil society. It is incumbent upon scholars then whose mission
it is as guardians of knowledge to combat against this anti-intellectual violence enacted upon (and
in the name of ) postmodernism, but to do so in a way that challenges rather than entrenches the
antecedents of the post-truth rise (Kester & Cremin, 2017; St. Pierre, 2014). Scholars living in this age
will inevitably reframe it to re-imagine social possibilities (Epstein, 1999), but they must do so in a
concerted effort to theorize with and for the people toward the betterment of society, not for the
sake of the academy alone.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This research was supported by the Keimyung University Research Grant of 2018.

CONTACT  Kevin Kester  kevinajkester@gmail.com

© 2018 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia
 EDUCATIONAL PHILOSOPHY AND THEORY 1331

Notes on contributor
Kevin Kester is an assistant professor of International Education & Global Affairs in the Department of Education at Keimyung
University in Daegu, Korea. His research interests lie in the sociology and politics of education with a focus on the inter-
national system, social theory, and qualitative research methods. He teaches courses on the foundations of educational
studies; modernity, globalization and education; and educational peacebuilding.

References
Epstein, M. (1999). Conclusion: On the place of postmodernism in postmodernity. In M. Epstein, A. Genis, &S. Vladiv-Glover
(Eds.), Russian postmodernism: New perspectives on post-soviet culture (pp. 456–468). Oxford: Berghahn Books.
Kester, K., & Cremin, H. (2017). Peace education and peace education research: Toward poststructural violence and second-
order reflexivity. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 49, 1411–1423.
Ning, W. (2013). A reflection on postmodernist fiction in China: Avant-garde narrative experimentation. Narrative, 21,
296–308.
St. Pierre, E. A. (2014). A brief and personal history of post-qualitative research: Toward post-inquiry. Journal of Curriculum
Theorizing, 30, 2–19.