Pre-Dialogic Agonism: Adult Learning, Hegemony, and the Epistemic Crisis of Post-Truth

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.