30215

Conspiracy and Misinformation in the Digital Age

Philipp Wunderlich & Anna Lea Berg

Kommentar

Conspiracy theories have become a hot topic, especially since their significant influence on protests against the COVID-19 pandemic measures. The wide spread of these theories is often associated with misinformation spread on the internet and is seen as a sign of a society where consensus on 'one truth' is increasingly difficult to achieve. But what exactly constitutes conspiracy theories? And how can we analyse their popularity, dissemination, but also their scandalization from a sociological perspective? In this course, we will examine different perspectives on the phenomenon of conspiracy theories in order to gain a deep understanding of the social, political, and epistemological implications of their study. In the first part of the course, we will look at the classical paradigms of conspiracy studies to understand how conspiracy theories have been defined and studied from different angles, and in connection to various research traditions such as social psychology, cultural sociology, science and technology studies, and critical theory. Among other explanations, we will discuss conspiracy theories as coping strategies, as forms of emancipatory knowledge production and as genres of pop-cultural entertainment. In the second part of the course, we will look at the connections between conspiracy theories and pressing political issues of our time, including the alleged crisis of science and expertise, the rise of right-wing populism, as well as the problem of Fake News and the transformations of the media system through digitalization. Our aim is to develop a critical understanding of how a particular attention to conspiracy theories can illuminate contemporary studies of these phenomena. Conversely, we also aim to explore how these current dynamics might alter conspiracy theories and necessitate new approaches to their study. Schließen