Abstract:

South Africa is characterised by persisting social inequalities, a vibrant civil society and one of the highest internet penetrations on the African continent. As in other parts of the world, digital media promised to revolutionise politics by giving a “voice to the voiceless”, i.e. creating a space for silenced and marginalised opinions, positions and counter-discourses. Recent local and international cases provide some sobering examples of how such voices may at times reflect fake news, conspiracy theories or hate speech. In this paper, I reflect on my experience teaching a third-year Journalism and Media Studies course on radical discourses online at a small residential and historically privileged university in South Africa. By problematising the normative ideal of the Digital Public Sphere as a space for equal, unrestricted and rational deliberation through the notion of radical voices, the course seeks to provide students with the conceptual tools to identify and challenge the boundaries of what is acceptable, possible or even imaginable. After engaging with a set of key readings and a brief introduction to relevant methodologies, students engage in collecting and thematically analysing relevant online texts. My experience developing and teaching this course over the past four years, including the moments of turmoil resulting from emergency remote teaching and learning, yielded some interesting insights in terms of teaching philosophy and practice, the themes chosen (and not chosen) and how students related their findings to the complexity of the South African context and their own diverse experiences.

Keywords:

Digital Public Sphere, Radical discourses, South Africa, Digital Media, Media Studies.