Catherine Tebaldi – författare

Alt-Education looks at the stories the right tells about schools: a fight between an evil, indoctrinating government and a far-right freethinking truth warrior, between a frigid cultural Marxist teacher and a loving Christian mother.This book explores the link between education, gender, and far-right metapolitics, and offers insights into the ways in which it circulates and is normalized. Through digital ethnography and fieldwork it explores the production, circulation, and interpretation of these discourses and the ideologies they express, tracing their movement across four groups of women in the US and UK – fascists, white nationalist, Christian nationalists, and Republicans. Although often understood to be opposed to education, the far-right is instead opposed to schooling – and offers its own practices of alt-education. Through media, alternative schools and home education, the far-right teaches their ideologies of gender and race, knowledge, and power, as well as transmitting alternative histories, sociologies, and conspiracies. From mom’s groups to digital discourses about the evils of public schools, social media are key arenas in which women not only teach, but are taught, far-right alternative knowledge. Alt-education teaches reactionary ideology as a timeless truth, normalizing it through discourses of home, family and love. At the same time, alt-education borrows and co-opts the language of critique – normalizing racism, sexism and fascism a kind of alternative knowledge, while making it exciting as a countercultural critique of “woke” liberal indoctrination. The book concludes with a look at this attempt to “speak post-truth to power” as a way of normalizing and spreading their ideology – bringing alt-education to a wide audience as their critiques of “woke” politics spreads across the US, UK, and into Europe.This book is aimed at scholars of the far-right and gender, as well as scholars and practitioners of education. Written in an accessible and engaging tone, this book will be of interest to both researchers and advanced undergraduates.

Alt-Education looks at the stories the right tells about schools: a fight between an evil, indoctrinating government and a far-right freethinking truth warrior, between a frigid cultural Marxist teacher and a loving Christian mother.This book explores the link between education, gender, and far-right metapolitics, and offers insights into the ways in which it circulates and is normalized. Through digital ethnography and fieldwork it explores the production, circulation, and interpretation of these discourses and the ideologies they express, tracing their movement across four groups of women in the US and UK – fascists, white nationalist, Christian nationalists, and Republicans. Although often understood to be opposed to education, the far-right is instead opposed to schooling – and offers its own practices of alt-education. Through media, alternative schools and home education, the far-right teaches their ideologies of gender and race, knowledge, and power, as well as transmitting alternative histories, sociologies, and conspiracies. From mom’s groups to digital discourses about the evils of public schools, social media are key arenas in which women not only teach, but are taught, far-right alternative knowledge. Alt-education teaches reactionary ideology as a timeless truth, normalizing it through discourses of home, family and love. At the same time, alt-education borrows and co-opts the language of critique – normalizing racism, sexism and fascism a kind of alternative knowledge, while making it exciting as a countercultural critique of “woke” liberal indoctrination. The book concludes with a look at this attempt to “speak post-truth to power” as a way of normalizing and spreading their ideology – bringing alt-education to a wide audience as their critiques of “woke” politics spreads across the US, UK, and into Europe.This book is aimed at scholars of the far-right and gender, as well as scholars and practitioners of education. Written in an accessible and engaging tone, this book will be of interest to both researchers and advanced undergraduates.

From anti-vaccine politics to aliens, this volume explores diverse critical approaches to conspiracy narratives representing them as playful stories with serious ideologies and effects.It examines conspiracy in relation to social power and authority, moving beyond either disinformation or revelation. In addition, it looks at how the genre of conspiracy is the performance of questioning authority to produce new forms of expertise which frequently stabilize existing power hierarchies.Across three parts, the book theorizes how conspiracy narratives are told, what they do in the social world, and how they circulate these social meanings. Part One offers semiotic and narrative analyses of the language of conspiracy as a genre. Part Two examines the social effects of these narratives, arguing that elite conspiracy is a means to stabilize social power, looking in particular at gender-related conspiracies around feminism, abortion and trans rights. Part Three considers the circulation of conspiracies and the ideologies they narrate, using unique mixed methods approaches to look at multilingual data in sites and communities in Brazil, Germany, and the USA.