The ideological, theoretical, and socio-economic context of critical HRD: A foundational introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce and overview the theoretical bases which inform a critical understanding of the ways in which social, political, and economic ideologies shape policy, practice, and experience. The chapter is designed around the fundamental notion that: 'All employees should have access to and control on their developmental experiences and these opportunities should be available across a range of levels in the organization. Programs should not only challenge the performative bias of the organization but also help its members achieve success on their own terms'. (Bierema, Human Resource Development Review 8:91, 2009), as well as the central notion that to move forward meaningfully in the contemporary context, Critical Human Resource Development (CHRD) needs to further return to its humanistic origins as a scholarly mechanism of problematizing performativity, stimulating further critical ideologies for challenging 'truth', which, in turn, may stimulate renewed pragmatic orientation while maintaining critical integrity in the field. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

Viral modernity? Epidemics, infodemics, and the ‘bioinformational' paradigm

Viral modernity is a concept based upon the nature of viruses, the ancient and critical role they play in evolution and culture, and the basic application to understanding the role of information and forms of bioinformation in the social world. The concept draws a close association between viral biology on the one hand, and information science on the other – it is an illustration and prime example of bioinformationalism that brings together two of the most powerful forces that now drive cultural evolution. The concept of viral modernity applies to viral technologies, codes and ecosystems in information, publishing, education and emerging knowledge (journal) systems. This paper traces the relationship between epidemics, quarantine, and public health management and outlines elements of viral-digital philosophy (VDP) based on the fusion of living and technological systems. We discuss Covid-19 as a ‘bioinformationalist' response that represents historically unprecedented level of sharing information from the sequencing of the genome to testing for a vaccination. Finally, we look at the US response to Covid-19 through the lens of infodemics and post-truth. The paper is followed by three open reviews, which further refine its conclusions as they relate to (educational) philosophy and the notion of the virus as Pharmakon.

Reinforcement Learning-based Counter-Misinformation Response Generation: A Case Study of COVID-19 Vaccine Misinformation

The spread of online misinformation threatens public health, democracy, and the broader society. While professional fact-checkers form the first line of defense by fact-checking popular false claims, they do not engage directly in conversations with misinformation spreaders. On the other hand, non-expert ordinary users act as eyes-on-the-ground who proactively counter misinformation - recent research has shown that 96% counter-misinformation responses are made by ordinary users. However, research also found that 2/3 times, these responses are rude and lack evidence. This work seeks to create a counter-misinformation response generation model to empower users to effectively correct misinformation. This objective is challenging due to the absence of datasets containing ground-truth of ideal counter-misinformation responses, and the lack of models that can generate responses backed by communication theories. In this work, we create two novel datasets of misinformation and counter-misinformation response pairs from in-the-wild social media and crowdsourcing from college-educated students. We annotate the collected data to distinguish poor from ideal responses that are factual, polite, and refute misinformation. We propose MisinfoCorrect, a reinforcement learning-based framework that learns to generate counter-misinformation responses for an input misinformation post. The model rewards the generator to increase the politeness, factuality, and refutation attitude while retaining text fluency and relevancy. Quantitative and qualitative evaluation shows that our model outperforms several baselines by generating high-quality counter-responses. This work illustrates the promise of generative text models for social good - here, to help create a safe and reliable information ecosystem. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/MisinfoCorrect. © 2023 Owner/Author.

Are You with Us or Against Us?

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, two contrasting images quickly became repre-sentative of the crisis. On the one hand, there were heroic doctors working day and night with the novel virus, risking their lives and making sacrifices to save others. On the other, there were 'anti-maskers' and 'anti-vaxxers': people doubting if the virus is real, questioning the ef-fectiveness of protective measures, suspicious that the crisis is nothing more than an elaborate plot, a scam aimed to redesign their world and to destroy the values they hold dear. Reflecting on research conducted in Ireland with people separated by the conspiratorial divide, this pa-per examines some methodological and analytical challenges of doing simultaneous research with opposing stakeholders. Analysing my own entanglements in the conflicts over vaccines and conspiracy theories in this paper I argue that the pandemic was not just a battle to secure the acceptability of specific medical technology (the COVID-19 vaccine) but was also about safeguarding respectability of science and maintaining the rule of experts. It was about pre-venting ontological turn, the end of the era of reason, a dawn of modernity.

Infodemic disorder: Covid-19 and post-truth

This chapter explores the concept of infodemic, which appeared following the overabundance of information linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. The overabundance of information circulating in the media ecosystem has two main consequences: on the one hand, the selection of relevant information is problematic and therefore it is made complex for public opinion to find the right answers to its questions;on the other, the amount of information that is produced, together with its rapid circulation makes it more complex to distinguish between reliable and unreliable sources, producing the risk of informations "pollution" and increasing the risk of coming across false or misleading information. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023. All rights reserved.

The new normal: governance, disruption and the post-truth era

Purpose The purpose of this study is to examine the new normal within a continuum of three types of disruption, each of varying duration. References to the new normal draw attention to the periodic and rising importance of different levels, types, and consequences of game-changing disruption for those in governance roles.Design/methodology/approach In this conceptual research, given the discussion of a return to normalcy near the expected end of the COVID-19 pandemic, the authors organize the literature on disruption in governance into a disruption continuum - emergency, crisis and super crisis - to demonstrate the differences in each type of disruption to establish a distinct view of the new normal.Findings Within the three types of disruption, the first two suit the rational authority model in which disruption is turned over to those in governance roles. However, the rational authority model comes under attack in the super crisis and is increasingly associated with the post-truth era.Social implications In Type 3 disruptions or super crises, the failure of those in control to set the parameters of the new normal raises concerns that the center no longer holds, and as a result, the assumption of an attentive public splinter into multiple contending publics, each with its version of data, facts and images.Originality/value The new normal is typically treated after the result of a black swan or rare and surprising long-lived disruption. In this work, the formulation of the recurrence, ubiquity and controversy engendered by super crises suggests that it is one of the features attenuating and giving rise to fractious incivility in the post-truth era.

The Social Construction of Leadership Power

What is called into being as "leadership” is what is intelligible as leadership through norms and "truths” at the time. It is not just based on the intent or characteristics of the leader, but on how subjects of the "truths” of the leader are constituted and hence conduct themselves. Leadership and context are connected and hence socially constructed. In fact, traditional, views of "universal” leadership traits as possessed by the leader do not help us explain or understand what has happened in Australia during the last 2 years of the pandemic, seen by most as a crisis in leadership. Having presided over closed international borders and a majority of closed internal borders and lockdowns for most of 2020/2021 the federal government provided heavily interventionist wages support for most businesses and workers in that time. Given the closure of international borders, and the priority given to suppression of the virus, the coordinated test, trace, and isolate practices delivered in each state were largely effective. With 90% of people double-dose vaccinated across the country in November 2021 and 9 days into the Omicron variant, the international borders and most state borders opened completely or with exemptions available. The Prime Minister "declared his aspiration to get the government out of people's lives… [becoming] a government in name only… " (Felk, 2022). Infections, and deaths skyrocketed and the test, trace, and isolate regime broke down in most places with long queues and people waiting for days for results. The new pushing through and moving forward "truths” were a major change in how leadership of the pandemic was now presented. By understanding leadership as deploying techniques of governmentality, how most people are asked to reconstitute themselves as "responsible” individuals who now valued their freedoms above social obligations of protecting others from the virus can be examined. In the new narratives of "leadership, " deaths are less important than hospitalizations and managing health systems. The resurgence of the priority of the economy shows a swing from one extreme of zero-suppression of the virus to the other, described by some as the "let it rip” strategy with one of the highest rises in daily cases and deaths in the world. The health/freedom/economy paradox remains and it is uncertain if the government can "strike the most effective response to it” (Grattan, 2022). By understanding leadership as techniques of governmentality where narratives attempt to tell "truths” for a period of time that constitute people in certain ways according to rationalities of governing, how construction of compliance or not and "leadership” or not through norms of intelligibility happens can be apprehended and therefore imagine something better. "Living with Covid” might be a better balance between more distanced pushing through, moving forward, and taking individual responsibility alongside social obligations and restrictions on freedoms that prioritizes living in addition to the economy. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

"The truth will set you free": disinformation and post-truth in the Bolsonaro Administration in the fight against Covid-19

Biblical verses are widely used by government officers in Jair Messias Bolsonaro Administration, president of Brazil since 2019. However, the practice has not been the same as the theory, since, in their official and unofficial speeches, fake news that promote misinformation. This paper aims to present evidence that the Government contributed to disinformation in the fight against Covid-19 in Brazil. The qualitative -quantitative, exploratory and descriptive research was developed by collecting the publications of the President of the Republic of Brazil on Twitter. It was counted the times that he mentioned, in the posts on his Twitter account, the use of medicines and substances with no proven effectiveness in combating the pandemic of the new coronavirus. His speech was analyzed from the notions of "information" of fundamental authors of Information Science and of truth and "post-truth", with the purpose of explaining the reasons why disinformation finds echoes in the followers of that president, leading to the context of their speeches and behaviors in other communication vehicles is taken into account. The results demonstrate how disinformation, even in a private account disguised as public/official, on social media, has major repercussions in the lack of adequate measures and treatment and, consequently, in the deaths caused by Covid-19 in the country. It is concluded that some of their posts and attitudes culminated in hate speeches and attacks by their followers on opponents of the Government, putting society in a limbo of misinformation, lost as to which health recommendation to follow and who to believe. After all, the word of the authority that should release (from the pandemic) did not align with scientific research and the recommendations of the World Health Organization, echoing contradictions, untruths and misinformation.

Truth Is a Human Right: Türkiye's Stance on the Fight against Disinformation

We are experiencing the rise of unprecedented opportunities as a result of the digital revolution, but regrettably this has also been accompanied by a number of novel threats. One of the most visible manifestations of these threats is the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation. The implications of this threat extend from the individual to the national and international levels, where misinformation and disinformation bring the risk of hybrid warfare and power competition closer to home. Needless to say, the breadth of these implications makes dealing with digital misinformation even more difficult. This commentary focuses on several global events where misinformation and disinformation were used as a tactical tool, including the 2016 U.S. elections, Brexit, and COVID-19. Then, we discuss the situation involving Türkiye, one of the nations that serves as both a target and a focal point of regional disinformation campaigns. The commentary then shifts to some of the Communication Directorate's most significant initiatives, such as the creation of the Earthquake Disinformation Bulletins, the Law on the Fight Against Disinformation, and the Center for Fight Against Disinformation. Finally, above all, this commentary aims to raise awareness of the dangers of online misinformation and urges international cooperation to ensure that the truth always prevails.

A Knowledge-driven Domain Adaptive Approach to Early Misinformation Detection in an Emergent Health Domain on Social Media

This paper focuses on an important problem of early misinformation detection in an emergent health domain on social media. Current misinformation detection solutions often suffer from the lack of resources (e.g., labeled datasets, sufficient medical knowledge) in the emerging health domain to accurately identify online misinformation at an early stage. To address such a limitation, we develop a knowledge-driven domain adaptive approach that explores a good set of annotated data and reliable knowledge facts in a source domain (e.g., COVID-19) to learn the domain-invariant features that can be adapted to detect misinformation in the emergent target domain with little ground truth labels (e.g., Monkeypox). Two critical challenges exist in developing our solution: i) how to leverage the noisy knowledge facts in the source domain to obtain the medical knowledge related to the target domain? ii) How to adapt the domain discrepancy between the source and target domains to accurately assess the truthfulness of the social media posts in the target domain? To address the above challenges, we develop KAdapt, a knowledge-driven domain adaptive early misinformation detection framework that explicitly extracts rel-evant knowledge facts from the source domain and jointly learns the domain-invariant representation of the social media posts and their relevant knowledge facts to accurately identify misleading posts in the target domain. Evaluation results on five real-world datasets demonstrate that KAdapt significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in terms of accurately detecting misleading Monkeypox posts on social media. © 2022 IEEE.

Are You with Us or Against Us? Studying Conflicts Over Conspiracy Theories and Overcoming the Great Conspiratorial Divide

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, two contrasting images quickly became repre-sentative of the crisis. On the one hand, there were heroic doctors working day and night with the novel virus, risking their lives and making sacrifices to save others. On the other, there were ‘anti-maskers' and ‘anti-vaxxers': people doubting if the virus is real, questioning the ef-fectiveness of protective measures, suspicious that the crisis is nothing more than an elaborate plot, a scam aimed to redesign their world and to destroy the values they hold dear. Reflecting on research conducted in Ireland with people separated by the conspiratorial divide, this paper examines some methodological and analytical challenges of doing simultaneous research with opposing stakeholders. Analysing my own entanglements in the conflicts over vaccines and conspiracy theories in this paper I argue that the pandemic was not just a battle to secure the acceptability of specific medical technology (the COVID-19 vaccine) but was also about safeguarding respectability of science and maintaining the rule of experts. It was about pre-venting ontological turn, the end of the era of reason, a dawn of modernity. © The Author(s).

Populist Communication in a Time of Global Pandemic: Understanding 'Post-truth Populism' During COVID-19

Populism and the post-truth: two concepts often used simultaneously or interchangeably to explain current developments in contemporary politics, yet the demarcation line between them remains blurry. Building on definitions of populism that describe it as a style of political communication, 'post-truth populism' can be regarded as a specific type of populist communication which shares the characteristics of post-truth politics. How the two phenomena intertwine, and how the aesthetic transformation of the public sphere and the rise of social media had a role in their appearance will be discussed. The theoretical framework is illustrated by two cases during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Is this the truth? A study of how undergraduates relate to potentially manipulative and misleading online media imagery

This mixed method arts-based study aims to answer the research question: How do undergraduates enrolled in an online course investigating visual culture at a large public Midwestern university relate to possibly manipulative and misleading online media imagery? Before educators can attempt to improve student media literacy, they must first understand how students experience visual media online. A holistic approach where students visualize their relationship with online media, respond to a survey of their attitudes and behaviors concerning online media, and demonstrate their abilities on anassessment of their critical media literacy, provides a rich snapshot of how members of Generation Z or Zoomers relate to online media.My findings reveal that students are extremely susceptible to manipulative or misleading media and that their unwarranted overconfidence may compound that vulnerability. Meanwhile, their art depicted feelings of anxiety, distrust, confusion, and helplessness regarding their relationships with media. With the increasing reliance on online media, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems as though misinformation online will only continue to proliferate with increasingly dangerous consequences in the real world. As a result, educators, especially art educators, are urged to try to help students develop visual and critical media literacy skills. Recommendations and lesson ideas are provided. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

Measuring emotions in the COVID-19 real world worry dataset

The COVID-19 pandemic is having a dramatic impact on societies and economies around the world. With various measures of lockdowns and social distancing in place, it becomes important to understand emotional responses on a large scale. In this paper, we present the first ground truth dataset of emotional responses to COVID-19. We asked participants to indicate their emotions and express these in text. This resulted in the Real World Worry Dataset of 5,000 texts (2,500 short + 2,500 long texts). Our analyses suggest that emotional responses correlated with linguistic measures. Topic modeling further revealed that people in the UK worry about their family and the economic situation. Tweet-sized texts functioned as a call for solidarity, while longer texts shed light on worries and concerns. Using predictive modeling approaches, we were able to approximate the emotional responses of participants from text within 14% of their actual value. We encourage others to use the dataset and improve how we can use automated methods to learn about emotional responses and worries about an urgent problem. © ACL 2020.All right reserved.

When the Truth Doesn't Seem to Matter: The Affordances of Disciplinary Argument in the Era of Post-truth

A disquieting aspect of some contemporary public discourse is its seeming indifference to or abandonment of any pretense to truth. Among other things, unsubstantiated and misleading claims have been made about the efficacy of vaccines and other purported treatments for SARS-COVID, the 2020 U.S. presidential election, and the January 6, 2021, insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. In addition, a spate of legislation restricting classroom discussion and instruction related to race, bias, privilege, and discrimination has been or is pending passage in U.S. state legislatures. These restrictions are antithetical to core functions of education, which are to inculcate the values, virtues, and advanced literacy skills that support democratic deliberation about controversial issues. This article discusses the increasing political polarization and partisan attacks on the processes of education and the threats to liberal democracy posed by this disregard for the truth. In addition, it reviews the cultural and psychological factors that increase our susceptibility to misinformation and presents a perspective about the pursuit of truth that highlights the educational affordances of disciplinary inquiry, democratic deliberation, and reasonable argumentation. The contemporary challenges are manifestations of long-standing political and cultural divisions, and their mitigation will depend on developing communities of informed citizens that are committed to the values and virtues that are foundational to liberal democracy. © 2023 SAGE Publications.

Reflection on Caring, Truth, Bias, Evidence, and Media Literacy During Current Events: An Invited Editorial for the International Journal for Human Caring

In the abstract for "Editorial Reflection on Caring, Truth, Bias, Evidence, and Media Literacy During Current Events,” the editorial focuses on the current state of divided truth in issues facing today's global citizens, such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccination, historical bias, implicit bias, gender identity, and disparity. Recognizing of the challenges faced in addressing truth, bias, and the influence of media literacy raises questions for caring scholars to contemplate advancing of caring science. © 2023 International Association for Human Caring.

A Novel Automated Classification and Segmentation for COVID-19 using 3D CT Scans

Medical image classification and segmentation based on deep learning (DL) are emergency research topics for diagnosing variant viruses of the current COVID-19 situation. In COVID-19 computed tomography (CT) images of the lungs, ground glass turbidity is the most common finding that requires specialist diagnosis. Based on this situation, some researchers propose the relevant DL models which can replace professional diagnostic specialists in clinics when lacking expertise. However, although DL methods have a stunning performance in medical image processing, the limited datasets can be a challenge in developing the accuracy of diagnosis at the human level. In addition, deep learning algorithms face the challenge of classifying and segmenting medical images in three or even multiple dimensions and maintaining high accuracy rates. Consequently, with a guaranteed high level of accuracy, our model can classify the patients' CT images into three types: Normal, Pneumonia and COVID. Subsequently, two datasets are used for segmentation, one of the datasets even has only a limited amount of data (20 cases). Our system combined the classification model and the segmentation model together, a fully integrated diagnostic model was built on the basis of ResNet50 and 3D U-Net algorithm. By feeding with different datasets, the COVID image segmentation of the infected area will be carried out according to classification results. Our model achieves 94.52% accuracy in the classification of lung lesions by 3 types: COVID, Pneumonia and Normal. For 2 labels (ground truth, lung lesions) segmentation, the model gets 99.57% of accuracy, 0.2191 of train loss and 0.78 ± 0.03 of MeanDice±Std, while the 4 labels (ground truth, left lung, right lung, lung lesions) segmentation achieves 98.89% of accuracy, 0.1132 of train loss and 0.83 ± 0.13 of MeanDice±Std. For future medical use, embedding the model into the medical facilities might be an efficient way of assisting or substituting doctors with diagnoses, therefore, a broader range of the problem of variant viruses in the COVID-19 situation may also be successfully solved. © 2022 IEEE.

When Life Hangs by a Thread: Representations of Covid-19 by the Mapula Embroidery Project

In 2020, the Mapula Embroidery Project were commissioned to produce a series of 14 artworks in cloth on the topic of Covid-19 and its impact on their community. However, as the article reveals, the relationship of the works to the actual lived experiences of project members turned out to be complex, indirect or even paradoxical. In their choice and treatment of subject matter, members of the project sometimes represent their aspirations rather than necessarily their difficulties. While sometimes exposing hardships people experience or illustrating their own fears, they also often represent scenarios that are suggestive of an aspiration to be part of an ordered society where difficulties are overcome. Furthermore, while the works include imagery drawn from designers' own perceptions of their everyday environment, they also at times incorporate motifs and text gleaned from online searches and television broadcasts, in effect recording messages and discourses about Covid-19 current at a particular historical juncture. Consequently, while not literal reflections of practices in the context of the pandemic, the cloths have an important "truth” value: they invoke people's fears and anxieties while also suggesting their capacity to sustain hope in a time of challenge and uncertainty.