Truth-telling Practices Research Articles

Coloniality and decoloniality in ‘comfort women’ memory activism: Transnational and transgenerational truth-telling practices in Australia

Coloniality and decoloniality in ‘comfort women’ memory activism: Transnational and transgenerational truth-telling practices in Australia

Unruly Truth: On Parrhesia and/as Political Refusal

This article employs Bonnie Honig’s concepts of refusal and intensification to conceptualize the ancient practice of ‘parrhesia’ as a form of conflictual, political truth-telling. This entails envisaging political truth-telling as an intense, agonal practice that does not establish unalterable foundations but takes part in world-building practices. To this end, I first reconstruct parrhesia as an agonistic practice of truth-telling. Against this background, I take up Honig’s concept of intensification to make sense of parrhesia’s intricate political stakes with reference to Euripides’s Ion tragedy. Finally, I reenvisage the bacchants’ secession to Cithaeron against the backdrop of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the cynic tradition, where parrhesia turns into a subversive political practice of displaying and prefiguring other forms of existence and social relations.

Who Needs to Tell the Truth? – Epistemic Injustice and Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for Minorities in Non-Transitional Societies

Abstract Truth and Reconciliation Commissions (TRCs) have become a widely used tool to reconcile societies in the aftermath of widespread injustice or social and political conflict in a state. This article focuses on TRCs that take place in non-transitional societies in which the political and social structures, institutions, and power relations have largely remained in place since the time of injustice. Furthermore, it will focus on one particular injustice that TRCs try to address through the practice of truth-telling, namely the eradication of epistemic injustice. The article takes the Canadian and Norwegian TRCs as two examples to show that under conditions of enduring injustice, willful ignorance of the majority, and power inequality, TRCs might create a double bind for victims which makes them choose between epistemic exploitation and continued injustices based on the majority's ignorance. The article argues that the set-up and accompanying measures of TRCs are of the utmost importance if TRCs in non-transitional societies are to overcome epistemic injustice, instead of creating new relations of exploitation.

The monstruous and the miscount: a radical theory of accountability

ABSTRACT Can public inquiries and truth commissions provide a space for political transformation? This article investigates the field of transitional justice to address this question, focusing on pessimistic accounts of the persistent failure of truth-telling practices. It identifies three main narratives on why truth commissions fail to promote change, namely the failure of implementation, failure of design and failure by design narratives. This article contends that none of these narratives satisfactorily answer the question raised by this special issue due to their attachment to a referentialist ontology and a linear temporality of truth-seeking. Combining Rancière’s critique of political philosophy with insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis, the article advances a radical theory of accountability capable of circumventing these limitations and elucidating the links between truth-telling and political transformation. Based on an anti-foundationalist approach, this theory sees the work of truth commissions as situated in struggles that constitute the after-maths; the process of counting the parts of a conflict (victims, perpetrators, collaborators) and making suffering count (as violence) by attaching it to an object source (a cause). Seen in a radical light, truth-telling appears trespassed by two organizing principles: the management of monstrosity (as a regime of visibility that formalizes suffering and apportions blame and culpability) and the inevitable miscount of the identities that populate the victim-perpetrators spectrum. The article argues that investigative commissions are doomed to fail, but it is thanks to this failure that they can offer a space for political transformation.

Science, power, and subjectivity: Vaccine (mandate) resistance and ‘truth telling’ in times of right-wing populism

This paper employs Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuaity: Confessions of the Flesh to shed light on the perplexing phenomenon of vaccine (mandate) resistance. It argues that vaccine (mandate) resistance, while seemingly irresponsible and selfish, is entangled with the same modes of ‘truth-telling’ that have been part of the basic structure of modern Western governance for centuries. The paper begins by introducing the problem of vaccinate (mandate) resistance as a pedagogical problem for educators who want to teach social responsibility as informed by sound scientific knowledge and research. It then outlines the triad of knowledge/science, power/governance, and subjectivity/being at the heart of Foucault’s research as a necessary frame for understanding the sociopolitical and historical entanglements of science in modern Western governance. Lastly, the paper traces Foucault’s study of early Christian writers such as St. Augustine in terms of how they help establish basic practices of truth-telling that still impact how subjects relate to power today. The ultimate goal of the paper is to show how exploration of the social, historical, and political realities of science related issues are vital for understanding issues of collective existence today.

The Birth of the Post-Truth Era: A Genealogy of Corporate Public Relations, Propaganda, and Trump

AbstractIn the early twentieth century, the most numerous and well-funded institutions in the United States—corporations—used public relations to make widespread and fundamental changes in the way they constitute and regulate their relations of knowledge with the public. Today, we can see this change reflected in a variety of areas such as journalism, political outreach, social media, and in the claims that we live in “post-truth” society. This article traces practices of corporate truth-telling and knowledge production across three periods I call the personal, the legal, and public relations, which are roughly coincident with the antebellum period, the Gilded Age, and the twentieth century, respectively. In sum, what can be found in corporate propaganda and now broadly across society, is that relations of knowledge have come to be refigured primarily as relations of power, subordinating traditional epistemological concerns like justification and belief in favor of government and control.

Rappaccini's Son

This essay considers the biographical speculations about Nathaniel Hawthorne's history of sexual abuse as an exemplary instance of insufficient archival evidence. It contemplates the implications of such insufficient evidence for the practices of truth telling in nineteenth-century Americanist historiography and literary criticism more generally. It argues for the possibility of accuracy without precision as an ethical alternative to dismissing insufficient evidence, and in elaborating this idea the essay identifies some of the urgency for taking up these questions at the present.

Biopolitical power and paradoxes in evaluation research with transnational migrant youth

In this article, the authors theorize the practice of evaluation as linked to truth-telling and organizing future societies. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of biopolitical governmentality, the authors examine the origins of the field of evaluation, theorize it as a truth-telling practice that aims to control populations and futures, and consider the implications of this for a current evaluation project with transnational newcomer migrant youth in the United States. The authors raise the following questions about evaluation as a social practice: Who/what knowledge is produced in the process? What mechanisms/technologies are deployed to reason, compare, and quantify migrant youth experiences, and at what cost? What are the ethical imperatives underlying this truth-telling process? The article offers a productive critique of current evaluation practices, providing theoretical and methodological implications of this analysis, arguing to expose the politics of governance embedded in evaluation.

Truth worth dying for: parrhesia in Lauren Oliver's novel “Before I Fall”

The post-truth ideology seems to question the possibility of credibility in present-day society; however, the very idea of truth remains potent. In this paper, we adopt the notion of parrhesia, or the mode of telling the uncomfortable truth without deceit and concealment, to analyze how the discourse of truth is presented in contemporary fiction. Avoiding its political aspects, we limit our study to the interpersonal level of parrhesia that shapes individuals as moral subjects and belongs to the domain of ethos. We select Lauren Oliver's novel “Before I Fall” for analysis because it resembles a confession that involves the characters and readers in the practice of truth-telling. Drawing from Foucauldian theory, we examine how the protagonist participates in the parrhesiastic game and how the truth transforms her after she completes the stages of search for the truth, test of the character, and care for oneself and others. We argue that in the novel truth-telling is related to the problems of school bullying, social separateness, and suicide. Through the rhetorical approach to narrative we show how narration reflects psychological and moral changes of the protagonist and examine how narrative judgments reveal the ethical values of the author and the readers. We analyse how the novel describes the problem of violence demonstrating that its source lies within the family and school where abusive adolescent conduct is caused by the inability of adults to create a healthy climate for children. Individuals deprived of emotional support and guidance tend to direct their rage and frustration towards others to reduce inner strain. Lauren Oliver demonstrates the effectiveness of the parrhesiastic practice in renewing social bonds between interlocutors and reducing violent behavior. We conclude that the novel establishes truth as the highest ethical value that includes developing a true self, leading a true life according to the principles and having courage to oppose false opinions of others.

Effect of Implementing Domestic Truth-telling Protocol on Stress, Anxiety, and Depression in Cancer Patients

Background: The present study was conducted to investigate the effect of implementing domestic truth-telling protocol on stress, anxiety, and depression in cancer patients. Method: In this study, a semi-experimental design was used to examine the effect of truth-telling protocol implementation on psychological factors (i.e., stress, anxiety, and depression) in cancer patients. A total of 60 cancer patients participated in this study, 30 of them in the intervention group (who informed their disease with truth-telling protocol) and 30 others in the control group (who informed their disease with usual way and without protocol). Patients’ psychological factors were compared in intervention and control groups, three and eight weeks after the cancer disclosure by depression, anxiety, and stress scale-21. Results: In this study, except higher stress level of patients in intervention compared to the control group, no statistically significant difference was seen in other variables three weeks after cancer disclosure (P=0.046, Z= -1.99). Eight weeks after the intervention, all variables were significantly lower in the intervention group (P=0.000, Z=-5.864; P= 0.000, Z=-0.651; P=0.000, Z=-5.351). Conclusion: Exercising truth-telling practice through implementing a localized culture-based protocol, especially after passing the initial acute phase of hearing the bad news, can lead to improved psychological factors in cancer patients.

Towards a metaphysics of the soul and a participatory aesthetics of life: mobilising Foucault, affect and animism for caring practices of existence

In his Lectures on Biopolitics (1978-79) Foucault highlighted the contemporary intensification of neoliberal arts of government, by which economic incentive structures are designed to control human behaviour and ‘life itself ’ through market transactions framed as enhancing efficiency in the distribution of goods and bads. The human subject of this ‘truth game of the market’ seems critically disempowered: conceived as a machine-like agent, responding predictably to expert manipulations constructing a governmentality that simultaneously disavows the amplifications of inequity and ecological damage with which it is associated. In the last works of his life, especially 'The Hermeneutics of the Subject' (1981-82) and 'The Courage of Truth' (1983-84), Foucault turned again towards the possibility of seeking other rules of subjectification so as to play the games of power ‘with as little domination as possible’. His encouragement was to remember the philosophical strategy associated with Socrates, namely to attend to oneself through activating the soul’s contemplation of the actions of the self: thereby composing an ethical subject whose actions, through practices of freedom and truth-telling, are not enslaved by appetites; and whose ethos of care becomes extended through the conduct of relationships with others, including life (bios) itself. This paper extends Foucault’s expositions on ‘the care of the self ’ and ‘the courage of truth’ to affirm animist and affective activations of the soul silenced through the consolidated colonial universality of so-called western knowledge. In doing so, the paper advocates a refraction of the games of truth infusing practices of domination in socio-ecological relations and ‘biodiversity conservation’, as a gesture towards amplifying an ethics of consideration for both human and beyond-human others.

Traumatic Home: Argentinian Victimhood and the Everyday Moral Comfort of Trauma

AbstractThe renewed anthropological debate on morality has invoked the idea that local moralities can be analyzed through the phenomenological arrangement of moral breakdown, which is followed by a liminal period of performing ethics that reinstates the unreflective moral disposition (i.e., home) of everyday life. The ethnographic example of the heterogeneous group of Argentinian victims of the last military dictatorship (1976–83) illustrates how ongoing ethical performance about trauma produces a reflective way of engaging with and in the world. These ongoing ethical performances are coined as “traumatic home” and constitute an everyday reflective moral disposition. From this local perspective, trauma is an intrinsic aspect of being alive that needs ongoing verbalization and reflection. The enduring traumas become expressible and meaningful by means of ongoing, shared practices of truth telling and informal therapies. Thus, by ongoing expression, trauma also becomes an influential source for everyday moral comfort.

Why do oncologists hide the truth? Disclosure of cancer diagnoses to patients in China: A multisource assessment using mixed methods.

In the United States and most European countries, cancer diagnoses are disclosed to patients. In China, however, the trend toward full disclosure has progressed slowly. The present study aimed to explore attitudes toward truth-telling practice among physicians, patients, patients' family members, and the general population, and reasons for nondisclosure. We administered a short survey to 212 physicians, 143 patients with cancer, 413 family members of patients with cancer, and 1415 members of the general population. A MANOVA was performed to examine group differences in attitudes toward cancer disclosure. In addition, we interviewed 20 oncologists. Interview data were analyzed using NVivo10. After the interview, we administered another short survey to 143 patients with cancer. Quantitative data indicated that physicians were the least, and patients the most, in favor of disclosure. Qualitative data among physicians and follow-up surveys among cancer patients revealed 5 reasons for the concealment of cancer diagnoses by physicians, including lack of awareness of patients' right to knowledge, cultural influences, insufficient medical resources and training, families' financial concerns, and the need to protect doctors from violence. There is a discrepancy between the needs of patients and those in medical practice. These results deepen our understanding regarding the reasons for oncologists' attitudes toward nondisclosure.

The Leader as Chief Truth Officer: The Ethical Responsibility of “Managing the Truth” in Organizations

Our aim is to analyze the position of the leader in relation to the ethical dimension of truth-telling within the organization under his/her control. Based on Michel Foucault’s study of truth-telling, we demonstrate that the role of the leader toward the corporation and the imperative of organizational performance place the leader in an ambiguous position: he/she is obliged to take the lead in “telling the truth” internally and externally, but also to bear the consequences of this “truth-telling” for the organization and for himself/herself. In this process of construction and implementing the truth, the leader is organizer and figurehead of the corporation’s truth-telling practices: determining the frontiers between truth that can be said and that which should remain hidden, both inside and outside the corporation; establishing a dialogue based on truth (i.e., an authentic, sincere relationship with all partners); guaranteeing that the rules of truth-telling are respected; and offering a truth which is compatible with the firm’s economic and ethical interest. Invested with the authority—the office—of managing truth within the corporation, the leader can be considered to be the “Chief Truth Officer.” From this perspective, we demonstrate that this role requires specific skills, like courage and practical wisdom.

Truth, the Self, and Political Critique: Authenticity and Radical Politics in 1960s America

In the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, appeals to authenticity were deployed across the political spectrum. Taken together, these notions offered competing and often contradictory accounts of what authenticity entailed, where it resided, and who could be authentic. Despite how ideologically diverse and protean these claims were, many activists chose to hold onto the term rather than jettison it. They contested popular accounts of who and what was authentic and deployed the term for their own purposes. In doing so, they were able to advance a variety of political causes. By analyzing four texts associated with movement politics of the time, this article shows how authenticity appeals could help marginalized groups to contest oppressive stereotypes, animate resistant practices of truth telling, and provide alternative accounts of justice, freedom, equality, and solidarity. In this article, I first show that the political potential of such appeals can be detached from the purported truth of their o...

Knowing one's death: philosophical considerations.

Coming to know and accept one's impending death allows terminally ill persons to face their mortality without deception. While life as such is a constant race towards death, terminal illness brings one's own death closer to experience. Being in the face of death in this manner can be transformed into an ontologically rewarding experience. Research on medical practices of truth telling in cases of terminal illness tends to show that there is healthy acceptance of impending death in western contexts, whereas in other contexts patients are more likely to do well when poor prognosis is concealed from them. This paper considers the case of knowing one's death in terminal illness, and explores responses to truth-telling and allied issues in non-western contexts like India from a philosophical/reflective rather than prescriptively ethical or empirically evidenced perspective. It argues that culturally contextualised, sensitive ways of helping patients know that they are terminally ill can lead to a more spontaneous and freer acceptance of death in nonwestern contexts.

Truth telling in Taiwanese cancer care: patients' and families' preferences and their experiences of doctors' practices.

Despite the significant role played by cancer patients' families in medical decision-making in Asian countries, inconsistencies have hitherto not been evaluated between patients' and families' preferences and doctors' actual practices with regard to cancer truth telling. For this quantitative comparative study of cancer patients' and families' truth-telling preferences and their experiences of doctors' practices, 532 patients, 551 family members, and 127 doctors (N=1210) were enrolled from five hospitals across Taiwan over 2years. Truth telling was assessed using the Taiwanese version of a modified Japanese truth-telling scale. Patients' truth-telling preferences and their experiences of doctors' truth-telling practices differed significantly in scores on the overall truth-telling scale and each subscale, including method of disclosure, emotional support, additional information, and setting (P<.001). Similar findings were obtained for families' preferences and doctors' actual practices (P<.001). Patients' and families' truth-telling preference scores were higher than doctors' actual practice scores. Multiple regression analysis revealed a dose-dependent effect of doctors' monthly truth-telling frequency on their truth-telling preferences, but this effect was only borderline significant (P=.08). This multiple regression model explained 30% of the total variance in doctors' truth-telling preferences (F=1.38, P=.22). Taiwanese medical educational policies need to be revised to better equip doctors to practice truth telling in accordance with the preferences of cancer patients and families. Communication skills training should be prioritized for doctors who refrain from truth telling in actual practice.

The Truth about Truth-Telling in American Medicine: A Brief History.

Transparency has become an ethical cornerstone of American medicine. Today, patients have the right to know their health information, and physicians are obliged to provide it. It is expected that patients will be informed of their medical condition regardless of the severity or prognosis. This ethos of transparency is ingrained in modern trainees from the first day of medical school onward. However, for most of American history, the intentional withholding of information was the accepted norm in medical practice. It was not until 1979 that a majority of physicians reported disclosing cancer diagnoses to their patients. To appreciate the current state of the physician-patient relationship, it is important to understand how physician-patient communication has developed over time and the forces that led to these changes. In this article, we trace the ethics and associated practices of truth-telling during the past two centuries, and outline the many pressures that influenced physician behavior during that time period. We conclude that the history of disclosure is not yet finished, as physicians still struggle to find the best way to share difficult information without causing undue harm to their patients.

Are surgeons and anesthesiologists lying to each other or gaming the system? A national random sample survey about "truth-telling practices" in the perioperative setting in the United States.

BackgroundThe perioperative setting demands strong teamwork to ensure safe patient care, but anecdotally surgeons and anesthesiologists are not always fully truthful with each other. The present study sought to determine the frequency of misrepresentation of the truth in the perioperative setting.MethodsDirect mailed survey in the United States about misrepresenting information to colleagues in a national random sample of 1130 anesthesiologists and 1130 surgeons.ResultsReflecting the sensitive nature of these questions, only 252 (11 %) surveys were returned-128/1130 by anesthesiologists and 124/1130 by surgeons. While modest numbers of both anesthesiologists (34/128, 27 %) and surgeons (8/124, 7 %) acknowledged misreporting information at least once per month, misreporting was considerably more common among responding anesthesiologists. Among anesthesiologists the majority (68 %) were concerned that surgeons misreported information to them once a month or more often, though only 8 % of surgeons shared reciprocal concerns. More than a third of responding anesthesiologists (36 %) reported having seen their teachers misreport information to surgeons during their training.ConclusionsThese findings, though preliminary due to the small sample, raise concerns about a possible culture of misrepresentation, passed on between generations, in some perioperative environments. Misreporting of information should be examined in more detail and addressed at local levels whenever it is found. Further research is required to determine if the reported behaviors represent routine gaming of perioperative care systems or deliberate and intentional deception. Strategies aimed at fostering conditions in which open honest communication can thrive should be investigated.

Foucault’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Cynic Parrhesia and the Biopower of the Powerless

While Foucault’s work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling ( parrhesia). The Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one’s existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel’s idea of “living within the truth,” elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics.