Childhoods, fake news and (de) democratization in Latin America: how to establish other beginnings through education?

Abstract

This essay focuses on the importance of children's fundamental human right to information and (also) participation (including the specificities of hearing-impaired children), at a time of democratic and epistemological eclipse as a global phenomenon, but with specific developments in Latin America and Brazil; in particular, in terms of (re) production of inequalities and violence as well as thematic and linguistic repression, in the Brazilian case. It proposes a reflection on the artifices of the so-called post-truth - through the phenomenon of fake news / lies as obscurantist and / or fascist forms of discursive and political power and as a strategic mechanism blurring the boundaries between the real and the forged, which already impacts on public policies and pedagogical practices in Early Childhood Education. It seeks to recover the central importance of active participation, citizenship, and education in human rights since childhood, for the configuration of new democratizing beginnings. In this (post-truth) context, the work starts with a mapping (based on Deleuze-Guattarian and decolonial thought contributions) of some events in the Brazilian scenario - reported by journalistic means or analyzed in other studies. The essay then weaves some reflections on the scenario of public policies oriented to children and articulates a discussion on intersectional issues (also related to audism and deafness), in order to problematize adultcentrism in these crossings and in antidemocratic governmentality projects. Finally, it seeks to point out some essential conditions for the establishment of other beginnings in childhood education.