Call for Applications

Panelists & Facilitators

Itziar Castelló, Bayes Business School, UK
Elżbieta Drążkiewicz, Lund University, Sweden
Yiannis Gabriel, University of Bath, UK
Sine Just, Roskilde University, Denmark
Peter Winkler, University of Salzburg, Austria

Purpose

This PDW, connected to the Standing Working Group (SWG) 06 Communication, Performativity, and Organization aims to further our understanding of post-truth concepts in practice. More specifically, we want to connect scholars interested in the (per)formative nature of communication (e.g., Ashcraft et al., 2009; Vásquez et al., 2018; Taylor & van Every, 2000) to explore how organizations and practitioners tackle current societal challenges posed by the rise of post-truth communication (PTC). The workshop aims to facilitate inter- and transdisciplinary conversations between early-/mid-career and experienced scholars, while engaging with practitioner voices to establish a shared understanding of post-truth communication and its related concepts in theory and practice.

In recent years, post-truth communication has become an umbrella term for a variety of different phenomena (Winkler & Schoeneborn, 2025): alternative facts (e.g., Knight & Tsoukas, 2019), fake news (e.g., Joachim et al., 2024), conspiracy theories (e.g., Harambam et al., 2022), disinformation (e.g., Bennett & Livingston, 2020), and potentially more to come. Each of these concepts attracts its own scholarly discussions from a variety of disciplines. However, what we are yet to understand more clearly is how these distinct concepts continuously come together, entangle, and interweave, informing and shaping one another. In their dynamic and relational nature and with increasing scholarly and public attention, they become more and more difficult to make sense of separately; however, broader terms aiming to bundle such conceptualizations may not properly account for their specificity.

Besides this conceptual challenge, societies face an increasingly interwoven net of democracy-threatening post-truths/non-truths (oftentimes also considered as ‘facts’), that, due to their complexity, are challenging to unfold and relate to. “[W]hat counts as a ‘fact’ [in such post-truth societies] depends on one’s political, religious and other beliefs, facts turn into stories and stories into facts, and eventually facts cease to matter” (Gabriel, 2024, p. 11). To complicate this phenomenon even more, scholarly discussions beyond organization studies evaluate the role of us scholars in constructing problems around PTC critically (Drążkiewicz & Harambam, 2021; 2024).

With this PDW, we aim to bring conceptual clarity to matters of PTC and discuss how those concepts relate to one another. What they undeniably share is a disruptive capacity that challenges our societies’ current communication and organizing practices (Winkler & Schoeneborn, 2025). These disruptive and polarizing capacities recently became day-to-day reality to practitioners engaged in journalism or civil society activities across the globe. ‘Under attack’ and in permanent defense, practitioners need to navigate the challenges PTC poses (ORF, 2025), for instance, through engaging in debunking activities. Engaging with a more practice-based perspective can therefore help us further challenge the grounding of our theorizing.

Post-Truth Communication in Organization Studies

Organizational scholarship has started to acknowledge the performative effects of PTC and their relevance for organizations and organizing more broadly, as well as our society at large (e.g., Knight & Tsoukas, 2019; Meyer & Quattrone, 2021; Winkler & Schoeneborn, 2025). For instance, Knight and Tsoukas (2019) explore how alternative facts serve as political mobilization and legitimacy, while the notion of post-truth points to a fragmentation of what the authors term as language games in mainstream politics. Similarly, Meyer and Quattrone (2021) reflect on the structural shifts that occur within “post-truth worlds” and how those affect presumably stable organizations. Building on earlier discussions, Winkler and Schoeneborn (2025) situate PTC as an organizational phenomenon that disrupts, destabilizes, or disorders existing formal organizations. In other words, PTC acts as a form of reorganizing the ways in which communication socially unfolds.

Turning the attention toward digital platforms, Joachim and colleagues (2024) investigate fake news attacks as “crises of legitimacy” (p. 29). The authors underscore the role of social media as a major source of information for the general public—a fruitful context for PTC, but also for (re)building legitimacy and collective discourse construction from the defense side. With her recent book publication, Just (2025) proposes another critical account of digital technologies as matters for stifling public debate through algorithmic organizing. She emphasizes the tendency to primarily consume information that already aligns with familiar viewpoints, limiting “the ability to persuade and be persuaded” (Just, 2025, p. 5) through constructive dialogue of opposing perspectives.

Aim of this PDW

Building on this emerging body of work, understanding PTC and its polarizing capacities as a Grand Societal Challenge (GSC) for contemporary democracies, the PDW aims to engage in the following questions: How can we conceptualize PTC? Which theoretical, methodological, and interdisciplinary approaches help us better understand PTC in practice? How does PTC function as a Grand Societal Challenge for contemporary democracies, and what responsibilities does this impose on scholars and practitioners? How can we establish a shared conceptual language for studying PTC across disciplines and professional domains?

While we acknowledge the important theoretical and empirical work that has been conducted on these questions so far, we believe that turning towards practical examples, for instance, from journalism and activism, can help us see the gaps between practical feasibility and abstract theorizing. This PDW sets out to illuminate the ways in which practitioners deal with different forms of post-truth attacks (Joachim et al., 2024) and what communicative and epistemological assumptions shape those practices. Easing up on our own professional boundary work (Harambam & Aupers, 2015), we want to explore how concepts around post-truth communication come to matter in practice. We argue that this change of perspective will enrich further academic debates and conversations over the course of the EGOS Colloquium in 2026.

Format

The PDW is three-parted. In the first part, a panel discussion, five interdisciplinary panelists share their perspectives on the topic of the PDW and discuss three broader questions:

1. How can we theorize PTC from your respective disciplinary background?
2. How does PTC organize society?
3. How to best methodologically approach PTC as an empirical phenomenon?

The panel discussion includes, besides the initial brief statements and discussion among the panelists, an interactive part with the audience. The second part of the PDW will encompass an audio walk. Given the online format, we encourage participants to step away from their screens and engage their bodies for a while. More precisely, participants will be given short audio files to listen to whilst activating their bodies outside in the fresh air (e.g., going for a walk). Workshop participants will listen to practitioners’ input and reflections on organizing within a post-truth world. Specifically, participants will be able to zoom into the concerns that practitioners within (mainstream) media, activism, and civil society organizations/think tanks face when it comes to PTC. These auditory nuggets serve as empirical grounding for the subsequent case work. The third part of the PDW is focused on the discussion of practical cases (in groups), based on the audio walk and the preceding panel discussion. Amongst others, the following questions can be tackled in the group discussions (each moderated and facilitated by at least one panelist): How does the case inform theory and vice versa? What can we learn from such practice-based approaches about our own scholarly inquiries into PTC? What is the role of social media platforms and other actors in the respective case, and what are the implications of these platforms and actors for how we need to pose our research questions and design our studies? The PDW will run as an online format, while participants may be able to join together if they are part of the same local hub.

• Part I: Panel & Discussion
• Part II: Insights into Practice – an Audio Walk
• Part III: Case Work at Roundtables

Application

To be considered for this PDW, please submit a single document of application (.docx or .pdf file) via the EGOS website that includes:

• A cover page with full details of name, affiliation, and email address.
• A brief motivational statement on why you would like to participate in this PDW, what you expect, and which question you would like to pose to the panelists as part of the discussion in the beginning.

• Ashcraft, K. L., Kuhn, T. R., & Cooren, F. (2009). 1 Constitutional amendments: ‘Materializing’ organizational communication. Academy of Management Annals, 3(1), 1-64. https://doi.org/10.1080/19416520903047186

• Bennett, W.L., & Livingston, S. (2020). The Disinformation Age. Politics, Technology, and Disruptive Communication in the United States. Cambridge University Press.

• Drążkiewicz, E., & Harambam, J. (2024). Introduction: Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth. In E. Drążkiewicz & J. Harambam (Eds), What To Do About Conspiracy Theories?: Academic Entanglements in Conflicts Over Truths (pp. 1-11). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032647463
• Drążkiewicz, E., & Harambam, J. (2021). What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth. Journal for Cultural Research, 25(1), 1-11.
• Gabriel, Y. (2024). Greek Myths for a Post-truth World. Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Harambam, J., & Aupers, S. (2015). Contesting epistemic authority: Conspiracy theories on the boundaries of science. Public Understanding of Science, 24(4), 466-480.
• Harambam, J., Grusauskaite, K., & de Wildt, L. (2022). Poly-truth, or the limits of pluralism: Popular debates on conspiracy theories in a post-truth era. Public Understanding of Science, 31(6), 784-798.
• Joachim, M., Castelló, I., & Parry, G. (2024). Moving Beyond “Facts Are Facts”: Managing Emotions and Legitimacy After a Fake News Attack. Business & Society, 65(2), 389-429. https://doi.org/10.1177/00076503241281632
• Just, S. N. (2025). Controversial Encounters in the Age of Algorithms: How Digital Technologies Are Stifling Public Debate and What to Do About It. Bristol University Press.
• Knight, E, & Tsoukas, H. (2019). When Fiction Trumps Truth: What ‘post-truth’ and ‘alternative facts’ mean for management studies. Organization Studies, 40(2), 183–197.
• Meyer, R. E., & Quattrone, P. (2021). Living in a Post-truth World? Research, Doubt and Organization Studies. Organization Studies, 42(9), 1373–1383.
• ORF (2025). Under attack: Populism & public service media. Österreichischer Rundfunk. https://zukunft.orf.at/show_content.php?sid=147&pvi_id=2530
• Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2000). The emergent organization: Communication as its site and surface. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers.
• Vásquez, C., Bencherki, N., Cooren, F., & Sergi, V. (2018). From ‘matters of concern’ to ‘matters of authority’: Studying the performativity of strategy from a communicative constitution of organization (CCO) approach. Long Range Planning, 51(3), 417-435.