Call for blog responses to social cultural myths around the Covid-19 Issue

The rise of hegemonic, misogynist and repressive narratives is on the rise on social media, Predominantly now around corona virus/Covid-19 crisis/ the excess time alternative that social distancing has provided. These excesses of toxic forwarding has escalated narratives and myths around, gender, race, religion, knowledge and knowledge production, medicine, Africa etc, Some social media groups are engaging and its members comprise of cultural critics who are immensely alert regarding social narratives, racist constructions and oppressive narratives aThese are keen to abort the circulation of toxic information. Other groups have great percentages of informed people, such that when the myths come, more than half of the group members weigh in and the myths are thwarted from circulating further. However, on the other end, there are groups that have no idea of the truth and the force of cultural constructions. Most of us have received individual messages from friends and family member asking us to confirm if some of those are true. We have had to do the toxic work that entails writing back short sms’s/Dms in response, albeit, sometimes in vain. We consider the complexities and toxicity of always writing back to respond to a problem, but do understand that the core of these myths and narratives are continued forms of slave and colonial violence. In other words, these narratives and memes emerge from histories of colonisation and oppression that some of our people do not understand. We consider that there is a call to understand in totally how narratives of oppression, race and gender work.

We are calling for short blogs to response to the society on these toxic circulations. It can be as short as a paragraph. We are calling on you to do the activist work of a cultural scholar. We are endowed with theft of research, that facilitates us to establish the basis of a false claim.  The focus of the blog does is that of a cultural critic, and to offer interventionist research.

You/We will share the toxic forward to respond to, then you can respond in a short blog write -up.

Write to drkasembelilab@gmail.com