This reading list is not a neutral collection of academic studies about misinformation. It is a map of power, memory, and pain. At first glance, it looks like a bibliography on “disinformation,” but the authors refuse to treat fake news as a technical bug or a psychological quirk. The list includes platform studies and communication research, but it also reaches into feminist theory, critical race studies, public health, and colonial history. This cross-disciplinary approach itself is a statement: misinformation cannot be understood outside the unequal structures that produce it. The syllabus opens with Abhishek’s critique of propaganda research that overlooks political economy, and then moves through histories of race, epidemics, war, and digital platforms. Along the way, it introduces us to people the media too often reduces to caricatures: the Black teenager killed on a street, the Chinese American worker blamed for a virus, the queer AIDS activist building care networks, the Muslim American neighbor placed under surveillance, the white voter looking for a story that makes sense of a changing country. To humanize this content is to remember that every citation represents real human experience. W.E.B. Du Bois described history itself as propaganda; Trouillot wrote about how power silences the past; Tuhiwai Smith called for decolonizing research methods. The works listed here carry that spirit forward. They insist that we cannot understand the internet without understanding slavery, segregation, internment, AIDS, the Iraq War, and the war on terror. Misinformation is not a rupture. It is the latest chapter in a long story of elites using language, media, and technology to shape what we believe—and to decide whose lives are worthy of care. The reading list includes both well-known studies and community-generated reports, deliberately blurring the boundary between scholarship and activism. It suggests that universities do not own knowledge, and that truth is something we make together, in conversation with the past.
One of the most urgent arguments in this collection is that propaganda is inseparable from political economy. Abhishek’s essay warns that too much research treats propaganda as bad information or foreign interference, losing sight of who owns the media, who funds the campaigns, and who profits from confusion. This is not a new insight. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction exposed the “propaganda of history” that erased Black participation in democracy. Hall’s work on media and ideology explained that the media do not simply reflect reality; they produce it. After 9/11, Snow and Taylor documented the revival of a propaganda state, while Kumar showed how U.S. journalists helped sell the Iraq War. Read together, these texts argue that disinformation is not an anomaly of the digital age but a normal tool of statecraft and capital. The syllabus also connects this political economy to race. Mejia, Beckermann, and Sullivan describe a racial history of post-truth: white lies have always been central to American politics. Chakravartty and Jackson argue that communication theory has disavowed race, making it harder to see how racism structures the media system. McMillan Cottom describes the meeting point of platform capitalism and racial capitalism—where algorithms extract value from bias and exclusion. Pasquetto’s insistence that “all disinformation is local” grows out of this political-economic view: we cannot understand the harm of a lie without understanding the neighborhood, the history, and the people who live with it. Humanizing this material means moving beyond abstract conspiracy theories. It means asking who benefits when a mother on welfare is painted as a “welfare queen,” when a Black teenager is framed as a thug, when a Muslim community is treated as suspect. These stories are not mistakes; they are investments. They justify underfunding schools, building more prisons, launching wars, and denying health care. The authors in this list invite us to follow the money and the power, and to see how our information environment has been shaped by centuries of inequality.
Race and whiteness are at the heart of this syllabus. Ahmed’s phenomenology of whiteness asks us to think of whiteness not as a biological category but as a habitual orientation, a background expectation that shapes what we notice and how we move through the world. Harris’s classic essay “Whiteness as Property” shows that whiteness itself is a form of property, protected by law and custom. Almeida explains how race-based epistemologies define whose knowledge counts. These are not just abstract ideas. The syllabus grounds them in painful case studies. Adamson analyzes media coverage of Michael Brown and the Ferguson uprising, exposing how journalists framed Black protest as criminal chaos rather than legitimate outrage. Noble’s work on Trayvon Martin describes the politics of spectacle, in which a Black child’s body becomes evidence of his own threat. Duru connects the Central Park Five to the historical myth of the bestial Black man. Cassiman and Covert trace the myth of the welfare queen, used to punish poor mothers. Alamo-Pastrana and Hoynes argue that professional journalism was constructed as “white media”—a standard that treats white perspectives as objective and nonwhite perspectives as biased. Staples looks back at how the white press wrote off Black America, and Bishop’s study of Japanese American internment introduces the “guard dog” function of journalism, in which the press protects state power instead of challenging it. The readings also include Gibson and Martin’s work on information marginalization, reminding us that poverty and disability shape access to trustworthy information, and Kilgo and Mourão’s research on protest coverage, which shows how the same event can be framed as a criminal mob or a justice movement depending on the race of the protesters. Humanizing this history means recognizing that words can create the conditions for violence. The internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans was made possible by decades of dehumanizing language; organizations like Densho and the Japanese American Citizens League still insist on precise terminology to counter that legacy. These readings should unsettle anyone who believes that bias is a matter of individual prejudice. The problem is structural, historical, and daily renewed.
The syllabus also shows how disinformation operates through public health, disease, and national security. Shah’s Contagious Divides traces how San Francisco’s Chinatown was blamed for plague in the nineteenth century; Noel and Ong document how COVID-19 was used to justify anti-Asian xenophobia. The Atlanta spa shootings, referenced by Fausset and colleagues, were the violent culmination of a political climate in which Asian Americans were repeatedly called the “China virus.” Bhaman and Sabal’s field notes from the early pandemic capture the failures of state care and the rise of mutual aid. The AIDS crisis haunts the collection: Brier, Cohen, Juhasz, Cheng, and McKinney show how official misinformation and silence killed people who were abandoned by the state. Queer and trans people of color, especially, were forced to create their own media, their own clinics, their own languages of love and rage. Perez and Dionisopoulos examine how President Reagan remained silent while Surgeon General Koop tried to tell the truth about AIDS. The lesson is that disinformation is not always loud; sometimes it is the absence of information, the refusal to speak, the decision to let certain communities die. The syllabus connects these epidemics to the war on terror. Said’s Orientalism, Kundnani’s The Muslims Are Coming, Nguyen’s Suspect Communities, and Bayoumi’s This Muslim American Life all document how Muslims and Arabs were cast as permanent threats. In this context, care is a form of counter-propaganda. Activists and ordinary people create their own information systems—zines, hotlines, community boards, mutual aid networks—because official channels have so often failed them. Humanizing this section means remembering that people are not tropes. A Muslim American teenager reading a news story about a bombing is also trying to get to school. A Chinese American elder enduring insults during a pandemic is also a beloved neighbor. The authors ask us to refuse the comfortable distance of “us” and “them,” and to see that the fear of contamination has always been a way to police the boundaries of belonging.
The 2016 U.S. election is a recurring reference point, but the syllabus refuses the simplistic story that Facebook fake news elected Trump. Instead, the readings dig into the deeper currents of identity and resentment. Mutz finds that status threat—the sense that one’s group is losing its place—mattered more than economic hardship. Schaffner and colleagues document the sobering role of racism and sexism in the vote. Carnes and Lupu complicate the myth of the white working class; Coontz and Frank offer earlier attempts to understand Trump’s appeal. Sides, Tesler, and Vavreck frame 2016 as a battle for the meaning of America, while Jardina examines white consciousness as a political force. Peck’s Fox Populism shows how conservative media manufactured a working-class identity, and Polletta and Callahan analyze the “deep stories” that made Trump’s narratives feel true to his supporters. In the background are the platforms. Tufekci describes how recommendation algorithms shape worldview; Noble shows Google’s search results amplifying racist stereotypes; McMillan Cottom locates the intersection of platform capitalism and racial capitalism; KhudaBukhsh and colleagues trace fringe news networks after the 2020 election. Freelon and Wells argue that disinformation is a form of political communication, not simply a psychological failing; Vosoughi and colleagues show that false news spreads faster than truth; Marwick and Lewis expose the strategies of media manipulators; Phillips and Milner offer a field guide to our polluted media landscape. QAnon appears in the syllabus as an update of the satanic panic—Lavin and Hughes trace this moral panic history, while Friedberg and Donovan analyze the organized campaign behind the slogan “It’s OK to be white,” and Marwick and Partin show that the age of alternative facts will not end with Trump. Worland’s piece on voter suppression and Freelon and colleagues’ study of Black trolls remind us that misinformation is also a technique of voter suppression, often wearing a mask of resistance. Humanizing this material requires resisting both contempt and credulity. People who share misinformation are not beyond understanding; they are looking for meaning, belonging, and control in a world that often denies them those things. But understanding is not the same as excusing. The stories that comfort some citizens are the stories that endanger others.
Finally, the syllabus is itself a call for a new kind of scholarship. Marwick, Kuo, Cameron, and Weigel offer a “critical disinformation studies” that centers power, race, history, and inequality. This means paying attention to the institutional whiteness of communication research: Chakravartty and colleagues’ #CommunicationSoWhite and Chakravartty and Jackson’s essay on the disavowal of race show that the field has marginalized scholars of color and the questions they ask. Washington and Kuo ask whose side ethics codes are on; Pasquetto insists that all disinformation is local, so measuring impact requires local knowledge. Collins-Dexter’s “Canaries in the Coal Mine” uses the image of canaries to describe Black communities suffering the earliest and worst effects of COVID-19 misinformation. Nkonde and colleagues analyze how the ADOS movement weaponized breaking news to disrupt Black voting; Equality Labs documents Facebook’s failure to protect Dalit communities in India; Feng and Tseng-Putterman study Chinese American “WeChat warriors” during the trial of Peter Liang; Flores-Yeffal and colleagues show how Latino cyber moral panics are perpetuated online. Trouillot reminds us that history is always told from somewhere; Tuhiwai Smith teaches that research can be a form of colonization or a form of liberation. To humanize disinformation studies is to center the people who have been harmed, to listen to communities rather than merely study them, and to see that the internet is not a separate realm from embodied life. We cannot simply delete the lies that divide us. We have to repair the social conditions that make those lies believable: poverty, segregation, surveillance, war, and the long denial of care. The readings in this collection will not give us an easy answer. They will, however, remind us that another world is possible—one built on trust, accountability, and collective care. The authors are not asking us to be perfect consumers of information. They are asking us to be citizens. That means learning to live with uncertainty, to listen across difference, and to fight for a world where no one has to prove their humanity in order to be believed.