Exploring possible future worlds with the practice of design fiction
Speculation as a means of critical distancing from the media

Une conférence de Géraldine Wuyckens (UC Louvain)

7 décembre 2022

How can we still argue about the climate? Double irony and opacification of positions in a Pascal Praud’s topic launch

In this post, I want to highlight a particular use of irony as a polemical resource for constructing a sceptical position towards climate change. The issue of climate change seems to be relatively consensual in public opinion nowadays. How then can we still make it an object of controversy, without being trapped in a “climate sceptic” position, which is now largely disqualified? This is the rhetorical stake that I will study in the following lines, based on a specific case: Pascal Praud’s launch of a topic on global warming in the television programme L’Heure des Pros (C NEWS) on 16 May 2019.

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Conspiracy speakers’ criticality: too little or too much? A Rhetorical Reflexion on Conspiracy Theories

If the well-studied phenomenon of conspiracy theories still catches our attention, it is among other reasons because it crystallizes many aspects of our society. For example, our relationship with the media, the notion of transparency, the phenomenon of fake news, but also our ability to live together and make society. In this post, we will focus on the relationship that conspiracy speakers build within their discourses with the notion of “truth” as a value. Our hypothesis is that conspiracy speakers are too confident about this notion; instead of being critical and doubtful about events – as they seem to appear at first – they are instead too sure of being right. In this perspective we will argue that within conspiracy discourses, truth as a value is paradoxically based mostly on the character of the speaker and not on the reasoning they expose.

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