- Social Research An Int'l Quarterly
CONSPIRACY/THEORY / Vol 89, No. 3 (Fall 2022)
Updated: Apr 18
Arien Mack, Journal Editor
Oz Frankel, Guest Editor
Dolunay Bulut
Endangered Scholars Worldwide
Mia Bloom and Sophia Moskalenko
Gendered Aspects of QAnon
Conspiracy Theory in Russia
Conspiracy Theory after Trump
Trump and his legacy of conspiracism for the Republican Party, tying this to larger shifts in the status of conspiracy theories in American culture and history.
Jennifer Hochschild and David Beavers
Conspiracy and COVID-19
We are working together on research about the impact of Covid-19 on support for President Trump during 2020. We are analyzing survey data that include Americans’ views about various Covid conspiracies (the survey firm calls them “theories.”)
Peter Knight and Clare Birchall
“Do Your Own Research!”: Conspiracy Theories and the Internet
With their relentless drive to connect the dots into one over-arching explanation, conspiracy theories seem to be made for the internet and its logic of hyperlinked connectivity. Once marginal ideas can now readily find a community of believers, creating complex pathways of transmission between the margins and the mainstream. Although it is very tempting to blame social media for the rise of conspiracism and a corresponding decline of democracy, those claims rest on shaky premises. First, some studies of online conspiracism in effect come dangerously close to creating their own conspiracy theory: they conjure up the image of social media users as the passive, unwitting dupes of a powerful cabal of Silicon Valley tech firms pulling the strings behind the scenes. Second, epidemiological metaphors of the “viral” spread of “memes” creating an “infodemic” of misinformation rely on the mistaken notion that participants in online culture are merely the passive recipients of targeted misinformation that is nearly impossible to resist. In contrast, in this article we focus on how the dynamic processes of meaning making and community formation interact with the technological affordances of the varying social media platforms.
Skepticism and mistrust in the context of conspiratorial thinking; possibly also representations of conspiracies in popular culture
The Conspiracy Imaginary
The essay will explore the role of popular narrative in providing ready-to-hand scripts about social power that feed into conspiracy discourse.
Russel Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum
Conspiracy theories and populism.
Conspiracy, Religion, and Knowledge
How "conspiracy theory" and "religion" act as strategies for managing specific kinds of knowledge claims in late capital societies, possibly examining some recent examples of how religion/cult rhetoric has moved into the political sphere, moving to a broader analysis of a shift in the epistemic economy.
QAnon and how it continues and departs in both form and content vis-a-vis prior venues of conspiratorial thought
Erol Saglam
Statecraft, Violence, and Paranoia
Michal Bilewicz and Roland Imhoff
The presence of conspiracy theories on the extremes of left-right political spectrum. This is a pattern that we repeatedly observe in psychological studies of conspiracy mentality: it is more often visible among the radicals than in the center.