The American Educational Research Association (AERA) recently announced its list of 2019 Division B Award recipients, to be recognized during its annual meeting on April 6 in Toronto. The Outstanding Dissertation Award has been given to EPOL student John Wesley Jones for his disseration, The Antidote to Willfulness: Manufacturing Dissent, Kony 2012, and Propaganda as a Technology of Governance (2018). (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign;Dissertation Chair: Professor Cameron McCarthy.)
Congratulations to Jones, who summarizes his work:
"In my dissertation, I offer a unique interpretation of propaganda and social media that expedites deeper comprehension of the current political moment by defining propaganda more broadly and dispassionately. I analyze the history of propaganda and offer concrete examples from recent events that demonstrate how various actors, state and non-state, influence public opinion and behavior through social media. My dissertation neither examines the utility of social media in a classroom context, nor criticizes misuse of particular social media platforms like Facebook. Rather, my dissertation argues for an expansive understanding of propaganda as a type of educative education for political ends. I define propaganda as a technology of governance, a collection of techniques that are used to gain support (or assent) from a target population. This understanding of propaganda is a recovery of older understandings of propaganda developed by scholars like Harold Lasswell and Walter Lippmann. Contrary to a narrow contemporary conception of propaganda that focuses on the (negative) quality of the information being transmitted my expanded definition focuses on how propaganda is used practically, foregrounding the purposive, intentional use of propaganda for political aims. By considering the goal-directed nature of propaganda we can begin to understand it as a practice that is pervasive in modern, highly-technological, liberal democracies."
