Abstract
Debates about “post-truth” often cast the epistemic crisis as a failure of individual rationality, positioning education as a corrective that restores respect for facts. Drawing on social epistemology, critical communication studies, and work on epistemic injustice, this article reframes the crisis as structural and hegemonic rather than a cognitive deficit. I argue that adult education has underestimated how material conditions, media infrastructures, and political projects shape the social-epistemic environments in which adults learn. Integrating accounts of epistemic bubbles, echo chambers, bunkers, and polluted epistemic environments with Marxian, Gramscian, and decolonial analyses, I show that many adults’ epistemic orientations are rational within their contexts. I place Freirean dialogics and Mezirowian transformative learning in conversation with agonistic democratic theory to argue that dialogic pedagogy requires pre-dialogic work. The article advances pre-dialogic agonistic praxis as a framework for understanding epistemic breakdown in polarized contexts, with implications for adult education theory, practice, and research.
The vocabulary of a “post-truth” era has become a dominant way of naming the current epistemological crisis. Politicians, journalists, and scholars alike appeal to images of a lost golden age of shared facts, lamenting that large segments of the population now appear indifferent to truth, science, and expertise (Friedman, 2023; Levy, 2023). In these narratives, adults who embrace conspiracy theories or reject established scientific findings are portrayed as irrational, tribal, or cognitively defective. Education is cast as a project of restoring respect for truth and reviving a consensus-oriented public sphere.
Recent work in social epistemology, critical communication studies, and adult education complicates this picture. The claim that we inhabit an unprecedented “post-truth” condition has been challenged on empirical and conceptual grounds (Friedman, 2023; Levy, 2023). Rather than a sudden collapse of commitment to truth, these authors point to long-standing ideological struggles over knowledge, the consolidation and restructuring of media systems, and the design of epistemic environments that make some beliefs easier to hold than others. From this perspective, epistemic breakdown is not a failure of isolated individuals but a symptom of broader political-economic transformations and hegemonic projects (Harsin, 2018; Hoggan-Kloubert & Hoggan, 2023; Walters & Watters, 2017).
Adult learning scholarship has begun to respond to this crisis, but often does so by doubling down on familiar ideals of critical reflection, rational deliberation, and autonomous judgment. Transformative learning theory, reflective judgment research, and dialogic pedagogy all presuppose that adults can be brought into communicative spaces where reasons are exchanged, assumptions interrogated, and more adequate frames of reference constructed (Freire, 2005; King & Kitchener, 1994; Mezirow, 1991). However, these traditions have been developed primarily with an eye toward relatively hospitable epistemic environments and moderate levels of political conflict. They are less well-equipped to address contexts in which educators are treated as partisan enemies, whole media ecosystems are structured as echo chambers, and hegemonic projects actively cultivate distrust of experts and institutions (Begby, 2024; Furman, 2023; Levy, 2023; Nguyen, 2020).
At the same time, work on epistemic injustice and epistemic oppression shows that the very category of the “rational adult knower” has been constructed in ways that center whiteness, masculinity, and bourgeois subjectivity, relegating many others to positions of diminished credibility or forced epistemic labor (Alcoff, 1999; Berenstain, 2016; Dotson, 2011; Fricker, 2007). Adult learning theory has often treated epistemic agency as if it were equally available to all, underplaying the ways in which race, class, gender, coloniality, and disability shape whose knowledge counts and whose experiences are intelligible in the first place.
The central claim of this article is that the adult learning field requires a more explicitly political, structural, and decolonial account of the current epistemic crisis and a corresponding reorientation of its pedagogical response. Drawing on social epistemology, critical communication studies, Marxist and Gramscian theory, decolonial thought, and agonistic democratic theory, it reframes post-truth not as an individual moral or cognitive failing but as a crisis of hegemony shaped by material conditions and contested epistemic environments. It further argues that while Freirean dialogics and Mezirowian transformative learning remain vital resources, they presuppose conditions of trust, mutual recognition, and epistemic standing that are frequently absent in polarized contexts. As a result, dialogic pedagogy increasingly requires deliberate pre-dialogic work.
The concept of agonism provides a framework for rethinking this problem (Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). Agonism begins from the premise that conflict is constitutive of social and political life and that attempts to eliminate disagreement through appeals to neutrality, consensus, or shared truth are themselves expressions of hegemonic power. Unlike antagonism, which casts opponents as enemies to be defeated or eliminated, agonism understands political struggle as a relation among adversaries who contest one another's projects while recognizing each other's right to exist within a shared political space. Crucially for adult education, agonism is not a dialogic technique or a communicative ideal; it names a set of background conditions under which dialogue may or may not be possible. In contexts marked by polarized epistemic environments, organized distrust of educators, and active discrediting of institutions, the problem is not merely disagreement over claims but the prior refusal of epistemic standing and mutual recognizability. An agonistic orientation, therefore, shifts attention from restoring consensus to cultivating the epistemic and political conditions under which adversarial engagement can occur without collapsing into dehumanization, authoritarianism, or epistemic domination.
This article does not attempt to resolve the epistemic crisis or to specify a complete pedagogical model for agonistic adult education. The scale and complexity of the problem preclude such closure. Instead, the contribution is agenda-setting and orienting: it clarifies the structural conditions under which dialogic and transformative pedagogies break down, articulates the need for pre-dialogic agonistic praxis, and outlines directions for future theoretical and empirical work in adult learning. The argument is intended not to close debate, but to reframe it.
Post-Truth and the Epistemological Crisis
The ubiquitous talk of a “post-truth” era rests on two key assumptions: that large numbers of people believe claims that are obviously false and that this belief reflects a widespread abandonment of concern for truth itself. Friedman (2023) posits that this narrative is philosophically and empirically problematic. It presupposes a naïve picture of a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” in which citizens shared common facts and trusted expert institutions. It also treats the present as an anomalous breakdown rather than as an intensification of long-standing conflicts over which institutions, authorities, and experiences count as sources of knowledge.
Friedman (2023) argues that this familiar story rests on a form of political naïve realism. Naïve realism in this context is the assumption that one's own side simply sees the political world as it really is, so that persistent disagreement can only be explained by opponents’ ignorance, moral corruption, or psychological pathology. Friedman further distinguishes between first-person and third-person versions of this stance. In first-person naïve realism, characteristic of much contemporary right-wing discourse, people treat their own opinions, lived experience, and what they call “common sense” as a direct readout of reality; when institutional expertise or empirical studies conflict with this common sense, those institutions are dismissed as biased or captured. In third-person naïve realism, more typical of liberal and left discourse, people treat the deliverances of scientific and journalistic institutions as the straightforward arbiter of reality and then describe others as having fallen into a post-truth condition when they reject those deliverances. In both cases, the language of post-truth functions less as a diagnosis of shared epistemic conditions and more as a way of naming some citizens as having abandoned reality. This framing makes it difficult to recognize that all parties to polarized conflicts are operating with contested background assumptions about which institutions, testimonies, and experiences are authoritative, and it obscures the structural conditions that generate and sustain those contests (Friedman, 2023).
Levy (2023) pushes this critique further by arguing that the problem is less our attitude toward truth and more the design of our epistemic environments. In his account, most people still care about getting things right and routinely defer to what they regard as reliable authorities. The issue is that many find themselves in polluted epistemic environments in which cues of trustworthiness are systematically manipulated. Under conditions of information overload, media fragmentation, and political polarization, individuals rely on heuristics and social signals to decide whom to trust. These heuristics are often rational given the information available, even when they lead to false beliefs.
Critical communication scholars likewise emphasize the role of media systems, political communication strategies, and long-term ideological projects in producing the appearance of a “post-truth” condition (Harsin, 2018). Rather than treating misinformation and conspiracy theories as merely cognitive errors, they trace how strategic actors exploit affect, identity, and distrust to construct alternative knowledge infrastructures. Quantitative studies of online networks show that users tend to aggregate into ideologically homophilous clusters and echo chambers, particularly around contested issues such as vaccination, gun control, and climate change (Boutyline & Willer, 2017; Cinelli et al., 2021; Cookson et al., 2023; Del Vicario et al., 2016; Diaz Ruiz & Nilsson, 2023). At the same time, other work suggests that the most extreme form of echo chamber dynamics may be limited to a relatively small subset of highly engaged users, complicating the sweeping claims often made in public discourse (Dubois & Blank, 2018).
The emerging consensus across these literatures is that “post-truth” is a misnomer if it is taken to mean that people no longer care about truth. What has changed is the structure of our epistemic environments, the distribution of epistemic trust, and the intensity of hegemonic struggles over whose knowledge counts. For adult learning, this implies that the central task is not to morally rehabilitate irrational individuals but to understand and intervene in the social–epistemic and political-economic conditions under which adults learn, know, and act.
Echo Chambers, Bubbles, Bunkers, and Epistemic Environments
Accounts of the epistemic crisis increasingly focus on the social structures within which beliefs are formed and sustained. Nguyen (2020) distinguishes between epistemic bubbles—networks in which outside voices are simply absent—and echo chambers, in which outside voices are actively discredited. In an epistemic bubble, agents miss important information because their networks are homogeneous or curated. In an echo chamber, they are socialized into systematically distrusting outsiders, so counterevidence is not just absent but treated as proof of the outgroup's malice or ignorance.
Subsequent work has expanded and refined this taxonomy. Furman (2023) introduces the concept of epistemic bunkers to capture social–epistemic structures built not merely to filter information but to provide safety for their members. Bunkers emerge in hostile epistemic environments in which certain groups—such as vaccine-hesitant parents, racialized minorities, or political dissidents—experience ridicule, dismissal, or direct threats when they seek information in mainstream spaces. Retreating into epistemic bunkers can thus be a rational, even necessary, strategy for protecting oneself and one's loved ones in a context of epistemic injustice and structural harm.
Similarly, Begby (2024) offers a rationalizing account of belief polarization and echo chamber construction. Rather than assuming that entrenched partisans are simply irrational, he argues that in non-ideal environments characterized by manipulation, disinformation, and partisan media, selectively curating one's sources can be an individually rational way to avoid being misled. Echo chambers can be epistemically harmful at the collective level, especially for democratic deliberation, while still being locally rational for individuals navigating hostile informational landscapes.
These accounts converge with Levy (2022) on the centrality of epistemic trust and vigilance. Individuals cannot, and should not, evaluate every belief from scratch. They must rely on social cues, institutions, and communities to guide their epistemic lives (Anderson, 2006, 2012). The question is not whether people are credulous or skeptical in the abstract but whose testimony they are disposed to trust and under what conditions. In an environment where experts and educators are framed as partisan enemies or corrupt elites, it is unsurprising that certain groups come to treat alternative media ecosystems, religious communities, or populist leaders as their primary epistemic authorities.
From the perspective of vice epistemology, Cassam (2019) cautions against reducing these phenomena to individual character flaws such as dogmatism, closed-mindedness, or gullibility. While intellectual vices are real and epistemically significant, they are distributed and activated within particular social contexts. Blaming individuals for their epistemic vices without attending to the environments that cultivate and reward those vices risks obscuring the political work that post-truth discourse performs.
For adult learning, this cluster of work has two major implications. First, many adults who inhabit echo chambers, epistemic bunkers, or protective bubbles are not indifferent to truth; they are responding to epistemic and material conditions that make certain sources appear more trustworthy than others. Second, educators themselves are embedded in these contested epistemic environments.
Epistemic Injustice, Exploitation, and Coloniality
The social–epistemic landscape is not only structured by polarization and media architectures but also by intersecting systems of oppression. Work on epistemic injustice, epistemic oppression, and coloniality foregrounds how social identity and global power relations shape who is recognized as a knower, whose experiences are intelligible, and who is compelled to do epistemic labor on behalf of others (Alcoff, 1999, 2007; Berenstain, 2016; Berenstain et al., 2022; Dotson, 2011; English & Mayo, 2012).
Testimonial and hermeneutical injustices, as theorized by Fricker (2007), help explain why members of marginalized groups are often treated as less credible or find that their experiences do not fit into dominant interpretive frameworks. Alcoff (1999) argues that social identity is deeply relevant to judgments of epistemic credibility, not because identity mechanically determines truth, but because identity mediates access to experience and shapes how testimony is received. Dotson (2011) conceptualizes epistemic violence as the failure of hearers to meet the vulnerability of speakers in communicative exchanges, particularly when dominated groups attempt to testify to oppression.
Berenstain (2016) names epistemic exploitation as a specific pattern in which privileged groups demand that marginalized people educate them about oppression, without recognition, compensation, or genuine uptake. This coerced epistemic labor can be emotionally exhausting and can function to maintain dominant frameworks by placing the burden of explanation on the oppressed. Davis (2016, 2018) analyzes epistemic appropriation and credibility excess, showing how privileged actors can profit from marginalized knowledge while continuing to marginalize its original producers.
Decolonial epistemology pushes further, arguing that the modern/colonial world-system was built through the violent imposition of Eurocentric epistemic frameworks and the systematic devaluation or erasure of Indigenous and Global South knowledges (Alcoff, 2007). In adult education, English and Mayo (2012) and Allman (2010) have long argued that Marxist and postcolonial perspectives are necessary for understanding how adult learning is implicated in global capitalism and imperialism.
These perspectives matter for post-truth debates because the hegemonic narrative of a lost “shared reality” typically refers to a mid-century white, Western, masculinist public sphere in which many voices were already systematically excluded (Dewey, 1927; Friedman, 2023). The call to restore that consensus can therefore function as a call to restore an unjust epistemic order. An agonistic, decolonial, and Marxist adult education must reject nostalgia for that order and instead attend to how current epistemic crises reveal both the fragility of hegemonic projects and the possibilities for counter-hegemonic and decolonial struggles.
Hegemony, Material Conditions, and the Epistemic Crisis
Marxian analysis insists that ideas and beliefs do not float above social life but are deeply rooted in material conditions, relations of production, and class struggle. The organization of work, property, and the state conditions what kinds of experiences are typical, which institutions appear legitimate, and what futures seem imaginable. Gramsci (1996) extends this insight by arguing that ruling classes maintain dominance not only through coercive power but through hegemony: the production of a lived “common sense” that renders the existing order natural, inevitable, and morally justified.
In Gramsci's (1996) account, hegemony is secured through a network of institutions, discourses, and practices—schools, churches, media, professional associations—that shape how people interpret their experiences. Organic intellectuals play a central role in articulating and diffusing the worldview of a class or movement, whether hegemonic or counter-hegemonic (Gramsci, 1996). Adult educators, especially those working in community, labor, or critical higher education contexts, function as organic intellectuals whether they acknowledge it or not (Allman, 2010; English & Mayo, 2012).
If we read the “post-truth” crisis through this lens, it appears less as a breakdown of respect for truth and more as a crisis of hegemony. Neoliberal restructuring, deindustrialization, and growing inequality have undermined the credibility of established institutions while intensifying precarity and resentment. At the same time, new media infrastructures have eroded the monopoly of traditional gatekeepers over information and interpretation (Friedman, 2023). The result is a contested terrain in which multiple blocs vie to define what counts as common sense, which experts are trustworthy, and whose suffering is visible.
Laclau and Mouffe (2001) rework Gramsci's theory of hegemony by emphasizing the contingency and discursive construction of social identities. For them, political projects assemble disparate demands into chains of equivalence, constructing “the people” against an adversarial “them.” Hegemony is always partial and unstable; antagonism and conflict are constitutive of the social. What appears as a shared world of facts is always already articulated through power-laden discourses that fix meanings in historically specific ways.
The discourse of “post-truth” can thus be read as a hegemonic narrative that does several kinds of work. It positions certain political actors and movements as enemies of truth and reason, implicitly contrasting them with a supposedly rational, fact-based center. It obscures the role of media concentration, corporate power, and state policies in shaping the epistemic environment. And it invites technocratic solutions—fact-checking, critical thinking training—that do not challenge underlying material and structural conditions.
For adult learning, a hegemony-focused analysis forces a shift from asking “why do some adults believe false things?” to “how are material conditions and hegemonic projects shaping the epistemic environments in which adults learn?” It also calls educators to recognize their own position within these struggles. When right-wing media ecosystems frame universities, schools, and educators as indoctrination centers captured by “cultural Marxism” or “woke ideology,” they are not simply making factual mistakes; they are waging a hegemonic battle over who counts as an epistemic authority and what kinds of knowledge are legitimate.
Agonism and the Impossibility of Neutral Consensus
Liberal democratic theory, especially in its deliberative variants, often treats politics as a process of rational discussion among citizens seeking consensus on the common good. This ideal has influenced adult education's emphasis on dialogue, critical reflection, and democratic participation (Anderson, 2006; Christiano, 2012; Dewey, 1927). However, Laclau and Mouffe (2001) argue that the aspiration to final consensus rests on a misrecognition of the constitutive role of antagonism in social life. Every hegemonic order excludes some demands and identities; no articulation of “the people” can be fully inclusive.
Mouffe (2000) developed the concept of agonistic pluralism. Instead of aiming to eliminate conflict, agonism seeks to transform antagonistic relations between enemies into agonistic relations between adversaries who recognize each other's right to exist and to struggle for their respective projects. An agonistic democracy does not imagine that all reasonable people will eventually converge on the same rational consensus. Rather, it builds institutions and practices that channel conflict into forms that do not annihilate opponents’ basic rights and dignity.
Adult Learning: Rationality, Autonomy, and Pluralism
Adult education has a long tradition of foregrounding rationality, critical reflection, and autonomy as central aims. Transformative learning theory, reflective judgment research, and critical pedagogy all assume that adults can revise their frames of reference through processes of questioning assumptions, assessing evidence, and engaging in dialogue (Baumgartner, 2019; Freire, 2005; King & Kitchener, 1994; Mezirow, 1991). In the context of the epistemic crisis, these commitments have been rearticulated in terms of rationality, autonomy, and pluralism as central to democratic life (Hoggan-Kloubert & Hoggan, 2023).
Rationality Beyond Technocratic Cognition
In the post-truth debate, rationality is often treated as a purely cognitive capacity that some individuals have and others lack. Adult education's commitment to rationality has sometimes been read in similar ways, leading to technocratic models of critical thinking instruction that focus on formal logic, argument analysis, or cognitive bias mitigation. However, contemporary accounts insist that rationality must be understood more broadly as a socially and historically situated practice.
Hoggan-Kloubert and Hoggan (2023) argue that adult learning must respond to the epistemic crisis by promoting forms of rationality that are sensitive to context, power, and identity. Rationality is not the disembodied application of rules but the capacity to assess reasons, evidence, and authorities under conditions of uncertainty and contestation. It involves epistemic virtues such as humility, courage, and openness, as well as the ability to recognize when one's epistemic environment is polluted or unjust (Baehr, 2011).
Vice epistemology underscores the importance of attending to epistemic vices—such as closed-mindedness, prejudice, or epistemic arrogance—that impede responsible inquiry (Cassam, 2019). Yet these vices are not free-floating traits; they are cultivated, rewarded, or punished within particular social–epistemic and political contexts. In environments where acknowledging uncertainty is framed as weakness and ideological purity is valorized, it is unsurprising that certain epistemic vices flourish. From this perspective, adult education cannot simply train individuals in rational procedures and expect that epistemic vices will evaporate. It must also problematize the material and hegemonic conditions that incentivize vicious epistemic habits and support collective efforts to transform those conditions.
Autonomy as Relational and Situated
Autonomy is often invoked in adult learning as a goal of education: adults should be able to think for themselves, make independent judgments, and resist coercion (Brookfield, 2015; Elias & Merriam, 2005; Knowles et al., 2020). In the post-truth discourse, autonomy is sometimes mobilized against paternalistic interventions such as content moderation or algorithmic curation. Yet autonomy cannot be reduced to independence from others or to mere choice among options.
Hoggan-Kloubert and Hoggan (2023) conceptualize autonomy as a relational and situated capacity. Autonomy requires not only internal capacities of reflection and self-regulation but also external conditions: access to diverse and trustworthy information, opportunities for meaningful participation, and protection from manipulation and domination. Autonomy is undermined when individuals are systematically misled, when their experiential knowledge is devalued, or when structural inequalities limit their ability to act on their considered judgments (Anderson, 2012; Dotson, 2011).
The proliferation of echo chambers and bunkers can both support and undermine autonomy. In some cases, withdrawing from hostile epistemic environments is necessary to preserve one's agency and dignity (Erickson, 2024; Furman, 2023). In others, bunkerization leads to dependence on a narrow set of authorities and increased susceptibility to manipulation. Adult learning must therefore attend to the ambivalent role of social–epistemic structures in both enabling and constraining autonomy.
Pluralism, Open-Mindedness, and Agonistic Engagement
Pluralism, as an educational value, recognizes the legitimacy of diverse perspectives, identities, and ways of knowing. In the context of the epistemic crisis, pluralism is often invoked against authoritarian and exclusionary movements that seek to impose monolithic worldviews. Yet pluralism can slide into relativism if it is taken to mean that all beliefs are equally valid or that power relations are irrelevant to evaluating claims.
Virvidaki (2024) proposes refining adult learners’ discursive capacities as a response to the epistemological crisis, arguing that educators should support learners in distinguishing between legitimate pluralism and epistemic permissiveness. This involves cultivating the ability to recognize when disagreements are grounded in competing but reasonable value commitments and when they reflect manipulation, bad faith, or structural injustice. It also involves developing the skills to engage across differences without erasing conflict or capitulating to domination.
Open-mindedness, often treated as a generic educational virtue, is likewise more complex in practice. Baehr (2011) conceptualizes open-mindedness as an epistemic virtue that involves a willingness to consider relevant alternatives and counterevidence, but also insists that open-mindedness has limits: one should not be open to revisiting questions where there is overwhelming evidence or where doing so would collude with dehumanizing projects. Dozono and Taylor (2019) show, in a justice-oriented pedagogical case, how teaching for open-mindedness requires teachers to confront their own positionality and the legacies of epistemic injustice in the curriculum, rather than simply inviting “both sides” of every issue into the classroom.
Here, agonistic pluralism offers a way of reconciling commitment to pluralism with the recognition of enduring conflict. An agonistic adult education does not aim to reconcile all differences or to arrive at consensus. Instead, it seeks to foster forms of engagement in which adversaries recognize each other as legitimate participants in a shared political space, even as they struggle over the direction of that space. Open-mindedness, in this view, is not an invitation to entertain fascist or eliminationist projects but a disciplined readiness to engage with adversaries who accept the basic dignity and rights of all.
Dialogics, Transformative Learning, and Pre-Dialogic Breakdown
Critical adult education has long relied on dialogic and transformative frameworks to support emancipatory learning. Freirean dialogics and Mezirowian transformative learning, in particular, have provided foundational accounts of how adults come to question assumptions, recognize oppression, and reorient their understandings of the world through reflective discourse and collective inquiry (Freire, 2005; Mezirow, 1991). The analytic focus here is not on restating these traditions, but is on the assumptions they share about the conditions under which dialogic engagement is possible.
Across both dialogic pedagogy and transformative discourse, dialogue presupposes that participants recognize one another as legitimate interlocutors, that educators possess at least minimal epistemic standing, and that shared norms of justification render claims, reasons, and experiences intelligible within a common communicative space (Freire, 2005; King & Kitchener, 1994; Mezirow, 1991). Even where power asymmetries are acknowledged, dialogic engagement is oriented toward the possibility of mutual recognition, uptake, and transformation through communicative interaction.
Under contemporary conditions, however, these presuppositions can no longer be assumed. In polarized epistemic environments shaped by fragmented media systems, organized distrust of institutions, and sustained hegemonic projects, educators are frequently framed as partisan enemies rather than as credible partners in inquiry (Friedman, 2023; Harsin, 2018; Levy, 2023). Learners situated within echo chambers or epistemic bunkers may experience invitations to dialogue as manipulative, condescending, or threatening rather than emancipatory. From this perspective, refusal of engagement is often intelligible rather than pathological, reflecting socialization into epistemic environments that actively discredit outside authorities (Furman, 2023; Nguyen, 2020).
These conditions generate what this article conceptualizes as pre-dialogic breakdowns: situations in which the social, epistemic, and political groundwork necessary for dialogic education has not been established. When educators are denied epistemic standing in advance, when claims are dismissed as ideological by definition, or when participation in discourse is experienced as epistemically exploitative or unsafe, the communicative conditions required for dialogic and transformative practices are absent (Berenstain, 2016; Dotson, 2011). The problem in such cases is not disagreement over claims, but a more fundamental breakdown in the recognition of who counts as a knower and which forms of engagement are treated as legitimate.
Naming pre-dialogic breakdowns shifts analytic attention away from individual deficits in rationality or openness and toward the structural and hegemonic forces that shape epistemic environments and relations of trust (Begby, 2024; Levy, 2023). It also raises a question that is prior to pedagogy itself: What kinds of work are required before dialogic or transformative practices can function without reproducing epistemic domination or harm?
Freire, Mezirow, and the Limits of Dialogics Under Hegemonic Breakdown
The argument advanced here is not that dialogics or transformative learning should be abandoned, but that they require deliberate pre-dialogic work under conditions of hegemonic breakdown. Where epistemic standing is denied and communicative engagement is structured by organized distrust, dialogic and transformative commitments cannot simply be presumed to function as intended.
Pre-dialogic work involves addressing the structural, epistemic, and political conditions that determine who is recognized as a knower, whose claims are heard, and which forms of disagreement are treated as legitimate. An agonistic orientation makes this work visible by refusing the assumption that consensus or shared truth is the default horizon of education. Instead, it foregrounds the necessity of cultivating conditions under which adversarial engagement can occur without collapsing into antagonism, epistemic domination, or dehumanization.
From this perspective, pre-dialogic agonistic praxis is best understood as a condition of possibility for Freirean and Mezirowian aims rather than as a rejection of them. It seeks to establish the epistemic and political groundwork upon which dialogic and transformative processes might later operate, particularly in contexts marked by polarization, epistemic injustice, and active hegemonic struggle.
Pre-Dialogic Agonistic Praxis
A pre-dialogic agonistic praxis begins from the recognition that educators are already positioned within hegemonic struggles over truth, legitimacy, and authority (Allman, 2010; English & Mayo, 2012). Rather than denying this condition, an agonistic orientation requires educators to explicitly situate themselves by disclosing their values, political commitments, and epistemic allegiances while refusing both indoctrination and false neutrality. Such disclosure is not a moral performance but a structural response to environments in which trust cannot be presumed.
This work also involves naming the hegemonic projects at stake in educational encounters without collapsing all disagreement into enemy relations. An agonistic orientation distinguishes adversarial engagement from antagonism by clarifying the baseline conditions under which engagement is possible, including recognition of the full humanity and rights of marginalized groups and rejection of eliminationist or authoritarian projects. Where these conditions are absent, refusal, boundary-setting, or withdrawal may be necessary components of ethical educational practice rather than failures of dialogue.
Pre-dialogic praxis further requires resisting epistemic exploitation and asymmetrical epistemic labor. Educators must attend to how demands for dialogue or explanation can disproportionately burden marginalized learners by compelling them to justify their experiences or educate others about oppression (Berenstain, 2016; Davis, 2018). Refusing such exploitation involves both protecting vulnerable participants and recognizing epistemic labor when it occurs, rather than treating it as an implicit obligation of participation.
Finally, an agonistic approach shifts attention from individual belief correction to the design and contestation of epistemic environments. Rather than assuming that exposure to counterarguments will dissolve polarization, educators can work with learners to analyze how media infrastructures, institutional power, and material conditions shape what appears credible, trustworthy, or imaginable. In this sense, pre-dialogic agonistic praxis is less about managing conversations than about intervening in the conditions that make certain forms of conversation possible or impossible in the first place.
Implications for Adult Education Practice Under Conditions of Epistemic Breakdown
The framework advanced here has implications for adult education practice, but these implications must be stated cautiously. Under conditions of epistemic polarization, organized distrust of educators, and hegemonic struggle, there can be no generalizable set of pedagogical techniques for fostering agonistic engagement. Any attempt to specify best practices in advance risks abstracting from the material, political, and epistemic conditions that shape particular learning contexts and may inadvertently reproduce harm.
A central implication is that educators cannot assume that dialogue is always possible, desirable, or ethical. In some settings, attempts to initiate dialogue may reinforce epistemic domination, expose marginalized learners to harm, or function as disciplinary demands to justify one's humanity. Pre-dialogic agonistic praxis, therefore, includes the capacity to refuse dialogue, to suspend engagement, or to prioritize protective epistemic spaces when conditions do not permit adversarial engagement without dehumanization.
Designing Agonistic Epistemic Environments
If Levy (2023) is right that the problem lies in our epistemic environments, then pre-dialogic agonistic praxis must include the design of epistemic spaces that are hospitable to agonistic engagement while recognizing the need for protection from harm. Insights from echo chamber, bunker, and filter bubble research can inform this design.
Adult educators can recognize that some forms of epistemic withdrawal are rational and necessary. Survivors of misogynistic or racist abuse, for instance, may need spaces where they can speak and learn without being subjected to constant attack. Protective filter bubbles and bunkers can preserve the conditions under which critical reflection is possible (Erickson, 2024; Furman, 2023). An agonistic adult education should not prematurely demand that vulnerable groups expose themselves to hostile adversaries in the name of dialogue.
Adult educators can cultivate “porous” epistemic spaces that maintain protective functions while establishing carefully structured points of contact with adversarial perspectives. This might involve curated encounters with texts, testimonies, or interlocutors that represent opposing views without granting a platform to dehumanizing discourse. The aim is not to stage false equivalences but to develop learners’ capacities for understanding the logics of hegemonic projects they oppose and for recognizing when engagement is possible and when refusal is necessary (Berenstain et al., 2022; Dozono & Taylor, 2019).
Adult educators can work with learners to analyze the media infrastructures, economic interests, and algorithmic systems that shape their epistemic environments (Cinelli et al., 2021; Cookson et al., 2023; Del Vicario et al., 2016; Diaz Ruiz & Nilsson, 2023; Dubois & Blank, 2018). Rather than focusing solely on individual biases, they can map how platforms, ownership structures, and policy decisions skew information flows and amplify certain affective dynamics. This structural literacy can support collective action to demand more just and democratic epistemic infrastructures and to build alternative media and knowledge commons.
Cultivating Agonistic Capacities
Pre-dialogic agonistic praxis also involves the deliberate cultivation of capacities necessary for sustaining adversarial engagement without collapse into antagonism. Central among these is discursive discernment: the ability to distinguish between disagreements that can be engaged agonistically and those that advance projects of dehumanization or elimination. Developing such discernment aligns with calls to refine adult learners’ discursive capacities in response to the current epistemological crisis, particularly in contexts where appeals to pluralism are weaponized to legitimate harm (Dozono & Taylor, 2019; Virvidaki, 2024).
Closely related is hegemonic literacy, understood as the capacity to recognize how demands, identities, and narratives are articulated into broader political projects and how one's own position is implicated in those articulations. This includes the ability to trace how “common sense” is produced, whose interests it serves, and how alternative articulations might be imagined or enacted (English & Mayo, 2012; Laclau & Mouffe, 2001). Such literacy shifts educational attention away from isolated beliefs toward the structural conditions under which beliefs acquire meaning and force.
These capacities also draw on reflective judgment understood in context rather than as an abstract cognitive skill. Under conditions of polarization and epistemic distrust, evaluating claims and authorities requires sensitivity to power, media infrastructures, and differential vulnerability, integrating insights from reflective judgment research with social epistemology (King & Kitchener, 1994). Alongside this, affective and relational competencies are essential, including the ability to manage fear, anger, shame, and grief without suppressing conflict or escalating it into antagonism, to sustain solidarity across difference, and to refuse epistemic exploitation without withdrawing from political struggle (Berenstain, 2016; Brookfield, 2015; Dotson, 2011). These capacities cannot be taught through abstract exercises alone. They must be developed through situated practices that confront real conflicts and power relations.
Implications for Research: Adult Learners in Echo Chambers
The theoretical framework outlined here has direct implications for empirical research in adult learning. One line of inquiry involves exploring how adult learners, situated across the ideological spectrum and across lines of race, class, gender, and coloniality, experience and navigate their epistemic environments. Qualitative approaches such as narrative, phenomenological, or constructivist grounded theory research can illuminate how adults make sense of encounters across differences in values, beliefs, politics, or social identity, and how these encounters challenge or reinforce their epistemic frameworks (Braun & Clarke, 2013; Charmaz, 2024; Creswell, 2013).
Such research can integrate insights from reflective judgment theory with social–epistemic categories such as echo chambers, epistemic bubbles, bunkers, protective filter bubbles, and polluted environments. Rather than treating echo chambers merely as obstacles to rational reflection, researchers can investigate when and how membership in such structures functions as a protective strategy, a source of identity and meaning, or a constraint on autonomy. Similarly, they can study how learners move between epistemic spaces, what prompts shifts in trust, and how educational experiences interact with these dynamics (Boutyline & Willer, 2017; Cinelli et al., 2021; Cookson et al., 2023; Diaz Ruiz & Nilsson, 2023; Dubois & Blank, 2018).
A research agenda informed by pre-dialogic agonistic praxis would attend to how adult learners situated in different epistemic environments perceive educators and educational institutions, including the conditions under which educators come to be viewed as adversaries, enemies, or potential allies. Such work could examine the forms of pre-dialogic labor educators undertake—often implicitly—to establish the minimal conditions for dialogue and transformative learning in polarized settings, as well as the points at which such efforts break down.
Further inquiry might explore how adult learners describe experiences in which their epistemic frameworks were challenged in ways that fostered agonistic rather than antagonistic orientations toward others, and how these experiences intersect with race, class, gender, and coloniality (English & Mayo, 2012). Relatedly, research could investigate how practices of epistemic exploitation, epistemic appropriation, and epistemic violence manifest in adult learning spaces, along with the strategies of resistance, refusal, and resurgence developed by marginalized learners and educators (Berenstain, 2016; Berenstain et al., 2022; Davis, 2018; Dotson, 2011). The aim would not be to produce neutral descriptions of belief change but to theorize how adult learning is entangled with hegemonic struggles in concrete settings and how pre-dialogic agonistic praxis can be enacted and sustained.
Conclusion
The epistemic crisis often labeled “post-truth” cannot be adequately addressed by exhortations to respect facts or by technocratic programs in critical thinking. It reflects deeper transformations in material conditions, media infrastructures, colonial orders, and hegemonic projects that shape who is trusted, whose suffering counts, and which futures appear possible. Adult learning, if it is to respond meaningfully to this crisis, must move beyond individualistic and consensualist models of rationality and dialogue.
By bringing contemporary social epistemology into conversation with Marx, Gramsci, Freire, Mezirow, decolonial thought, and agonistic democratic theory, this article has argued for a reorientation of adult learning around pre-dialogic agonistic praxis. Such a praxis acknowledges that educators are already positioned within hegemonic and colonial struggles; that many adult learners inhabit echo chambers, epistemic bunkers, and protective filter bubbles for reasons that are often rational given their circumstances; and that the conditions for dialogue cannot be taken for granted in contexts marked by epistemic injustice and epistemic exploitation.
Pre-dialogic work involves explicitly positioning educators as organic intellectuals committed to humanization and justice, contesting hegemonic narratives that construct them as enemies, designing epistemic environments that are both protective and porous, and cultivating the capacities necessary for agonistic engagement. It also calls for empirical research that attends to adult learners’ lived experiences of navigating polarized epistemic landscapes, with particular attention to how race, class, gender, and coloniality shape those experiences.
In a world where some deny the existence of climate change, systemic racism, or entire categories of people, adult learning cannot pretend to stand outside conflict. The task is not to restore a mythical consensus but to support adults in learning how to struggle over truth and justice in ways that refuse dehumanization, resist epistemic exploitation, and open horizons for hegemony-transcending and decolonial transformations.
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.