The Whirl of Knowledge in Twitter: (anti-)populist hegemony challengers

The Whirl of Knowledge in Twitter: (anti-)populist hegemony challengers Emilia Palonen, University of Helsinki (emilia.palonen@helsinki.fi) This chapter asks whether hegemony challenging is simply a task for the radical right in their anti-science rhetoric, or can it also take place in the pro-science rhetoric. It considers hegemony challengers in frontier building and the extension of the frontier of antagonism a profoundly populist activity (Laclau 2005; Palonen 2020). The chapter explores two cases in the hybrid media environment. It draws from a trans-European Twitter database from the European Parliament elections in 2019 of an Academy of Finland project (WhiKnow 2019-22), and hopes to supplement it with autoethnographic reflections on Twitter collected in 2020-2021. On the one hand, the chapter unveils practices and logics of the radical right, from drawing of frontiers to use of humour and ridicule. The examples from Twitter demonstrate systematic attacks on academics but also more subtle ways of communicating alternative knowledge. On the other hand, the chapter looks at how and what academics communicate on Twitter. It explores possibilities of hegemony mobilisation in new forms of academic knowledge production in the open science of Twitter platforms, potentially anti-populist and pro-science communication. This is an interpretive study on mixed data from a keyword and hashtag drawn dataset and autoethnographic data collection. The methods reflect relationality: network analysis for interaction, topic modelling and discourse theoretical readings of selected thematic Twitter discussion chains. Ultimately, the chapter seeks to identify a “Whirl of Knowledge” where traditional forms of meaning-making are connected in a network of the experts and journalists and politicians for a network. It is spinned to maintain or generate alternative knowledge – in filter bubbles, but also through the interaction with the so-called mainstream “other”, which our research seeks to locate, and unveil the multiplicity of voices involved in this process of communication.