J Harambam
Biographic Data
| ID | 44456 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Harambam |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Harambam |
| SIGNATURE | HARAMBAM J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Amsterdam |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8286-7147 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 129 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Caught in the Fray. How Climate Scientists Navigate the Public Sphere
Climate scientists are increasingly drawn into a polarized public sphere, challenging relations between science and society. In this study, we interviewed thirty-five climate scientists – diverse in discipline and seniority – working in the Netherlands about their perceptions of, and experiences with public engagement. Based on our empirical material, we construct an analytical framework with a politization and participation axis on which we posi…
Don’t Look Up: Satirical cli-fi movies as a catalyst for online environmental debate
In a post-truth context where environmental claims of scientists and politicians are increasingly contested, this article explores how satirical climate fiction facilitates the imagination of and engagement with climate change. Taking Don’t Look Up (2021) as a case study, it presents a thematic analysis of 640 Reddit contributions. The analysis reveals that the movie served as a meaningful text, decoded in various ways, and invited the audience t…
Caught in Construction: Why Dutch Sovereign Citizens Challenge the Bureaucratic State
Governments and scholars worldwide have raised alarm about the increasing popularity of sovereign citizen movements, whose adherents rely on conspiratorial narratives to declare their governments illegitimate and themselves sovereign. While a sovereign citizen movement emerged in the Netherlands in recent years, it has not yet received much scholarly attention. Moreover, numerous studies on sovereign citizen narratives emphasize etic perspectives…
What To Do About Conspiracy Theories?: Academic Entanglements in Conflicts Over Truths
Increasingly social activists, journalists and policy makers have expressed concern over the proliferation of conspiracy theories in the public space. There is a growing fear of their impact on social cohesion and democracy, their power to erode trust in state institutions and science. These concerns often come with an expectation that it is the responsibility of academics to engage with conspiracy beliefs by countering them. But should they? \n …
Putting a Human Face on the Algorithm: Co-Designing Recommender Personae to Democratize News Recommender Systems
Algorithmic recommender systems are on the rise in various societal domains, including journalism. While they offer great promise by making useful selections of large content pools, they raise various ethical and societal concerns due to their alleged lack of transparency, diversity and agency. Especially in the news context, this has serious implications because access to information is crucial in democratic societies. In this article we empiric…
Reclaiming agency against the new world order: Beyond the coping mechanism frame in conspiracy theory studies
Conspiracy theories about evil globalist elites and their totalitarian agenda are widespread in Western societies. Some scholars attribute their popularity to the complexities of modernity: conspiracy narratives offer frightening yet reassuringly simplistic explanations of world events. This approach, that we call the coping mechanism frame, regards conspiracy believers are insecure, fearful, comfort-seeking individuals. This study examines wheth…
Threat or menace to media pluralism? A framework to assess alternative conspiracy media in today’s information landscape
In this article, we examine recent changes in Western media landscapes that witnessed the emergence of alternative conspiracy media critiquing the epistemic hegemony of legacy media, and explore ways to analyze whether they contribute to or hinder democratic discourse. This pressing question depends not only on the empirical manifestations of such media outlets, but also on the ideal conceptualization of media pluralism, which is contingent upon …
Reactionary Exiles. How Conspiracy Theorists Deal with Socio-Technological Exclusion
Due to growing public concerns regarding the consequences of disinformation and conspiracy theories, major tech companies have introduced policies to curtail them on their platforms. Until now, the academic debate has largely focused on whether these punitive policies are effective. In this study, we address the question of how de-platformed 'conspiracy theorists' themselves experience and deal with such socio-technological exclusion. Drawing on …
Distrusting Consensus: How a Uniform Corona Pandemic Narrative Fostered Suspicion and Conspiracy Theories
Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics) garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would develop distrusts towards those institutions and the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Their ideas are often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their…
Trust, media, and science in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic
The first global pandemic of the information age has revealed how the coordinated spread of accurate information and the communication of relevant expert knowledge rely on functioning media channels, platforms, and institutions. As such, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, and sometimes even catalyzed, longer-running societal processes through which traditional gatekeepers of scientific truth and expertise have been challenged or side-stepped, …
Debating (in) echo chambers: How culture shapes communication in conspiracy theory networks on YouTube
The ubiquity of social media platforms fuels heated discussions about algorithms and selection biases leading people into online “echo chambers.” Scholars argue that social media deepen societal polarization and fuel political extremism. However, studies often focus on media effects, disregarding individual agency and (sub)cultural values that shape communication. As a strategic case study, this article, based on a mixed-methods analysis, includi…
The Corona Truth Wars: Epistemic Disputes and Societal Conflicts around a Pandemic—An Introduction to the Special Issue
Ever since the start of the Corona pandemic, different and often conflicting views have emerged about the virus and how to appropriately deal with it. Such epistemic, societal, and economic criticisms, including those about government imposed measures, have often been dismissed as dangerous forms of conspiratorial disinformation that should be (and have been) excluded from the realm of reasonable political discussion. However, since these critiqu…
Poly-truth, or the limits of pluralism: Popular debates on conspiracy theories in a post-truth era
Conspiracy theories are central to “post-truth” discussions. Official knowledge, backed by science, politics, and media, is distrusted by various people resorting to alternative (conspiratorial) explanations. While elite commentators lament the rise of such “untruths,” we know little of people’s everyday opinions on this topic, despite their societal ramifications. We therefore performed a qualitative content analysis of 522 comments under a Dutc…
Picturing Opaque Power: How Conspiracy Theorists Construct Oppositional Videos on YouTube
Conspiracy theories were once perceived as delusions of individuals on the fringes of society, but have become commonplace in mainstream culture. Today, they are produced, consumed, and circulated on various online media environments. From memes on 4chan, QAnon influencers on Instagram, to flat earth or antivaxx videos on YouTube, modern-day conspiracy culture embodies compelling mediated images and narratives that are composed of various audiovi…
What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth
Many people use conspiracy theories to make sense of a changing world and its ever more complexif social structures (e.g., international financial systems, global bodies of governance), tragic events (e.g., terrorist attacks, man-made catastrophes, or natural disasters), or socio-political and economic issues (e.g., security, migration, distribution of resources, health care). The widespread flourishing of conspiracy theories in this context has …
Against modernist illusions: Why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories
Various societal and academic actors argue that conspiracy theories should be debunked by insisting on the truthfulness of real “facts” provided by established epistemic institutions. But are academic scholars the appropriate actors to correct people’s beliefs and is that the right and most productive thing to do? Drawing on years of ethnographic research experiences in the Dutch conspiracy milieu, I explain in this paper why debunking conspiracy…
Marketable religion: How game company Ubisoft commodified religion for a global audience
Videogame companies are selling religion to an overwhelmingly secular demographic. Ubisoft, the biggest company in the world’s biggest cultural industry, created a best-selling franchise about a conflict over Biblical artefacts between Muslim Assassins and Christian Templars. Who decides to put religion into those games? How? And why? To find out, we interviewed 22 developers on the Assassin’s Creed franchise, including directors and writers. Bas…
The Corona Truth Wars
The current corona pandemic disrupts the entire world like and threatens not only public health, but our economies, social relations, democracies, rule of law, mental well-being and more. While we may have more understanding of the Sars-Cov-2 virus than half a year ago, much of what it does and how to combat it is still uncertain, despite a dazzling amount of research on it. That may be logical when new issues arise, but the situation is complica…
Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability
In this ethnographic study, the author takes an agnostic stance towards the truth value of conspiracy theories and delves into the everyday lives of people active in the conspiracy milieu to understand better what the contemporary appeal of conspiracy theories is.Conspiracy theories have become popular cultural products, endorsed and shared by significant segments of Western societies. Yet our understanding of who these people are and why they ar…
Post-human encounters: Humanising the technological Other in videogames
Whether we are talking about Alexa, chat bots or a videogame character, technological artefacts are increasingly being developed to mimic different aspects of being human. However, research on people’s experience with such technologies and the cultural imaginations of what makes them human remains underdeveloped. Guided by a reexamination of the sociocultural concept of the Other, this article empirically studies how and why players humanise non-…
We are what we click: Understanding time and content-based habits of online news readers
The article contributes both conceptually and methodologically to the study of online news consumption by introducing new approaches to measuring user information behaviour and proposing a typology of users based on their click behaviour. Using as a case study two online outlets of large national newspapers, it employs computational approaches to detect patterns in time- and content-based user interactions with news content based on clickstream d…
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories are an integral part of contemporary societies, yet sociological research on the topic is still scarce. This is particularly problematic because conspiracy theories are not just theoretical ideas formulated in the abstract but are lived social and cultural phenomena that beg for more sociological analysis and explanation. In this entry, we review the history of the academic study of conspiracy theories, moving from pathologiza…
Mechanisms of Disclosure: A Socio-technical Perspective on Sociality in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games
It is a mainstay in game studies that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games are boasting social relations and community formation. Considering games as “sociotechnical” environments, this article studies how the usage of external communication technologies in an online video game guild shapes the members’ social dynamics. Based on a one-year ethnographic study of a women’s guild in The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO), the analysis shows tha…
From the unbelievable to the undeniable: Epistemological pluralism, or how conspiracy theorists legitimate their extraordinary truth claims
Despite their stigma, conspiracy theories are hugely popular today and have pervaded mainstream culture. Increasingly, such theories expanded into large master schemes of deceit where ‘everything is connected’. Moving beyond discussions of their truthfulness, we study in this article how such ‘super conspiracy theories’ are made plausible. We strategically selected the case study of David Icke – a true celebrity in conspiracy circles and main pro…
Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames
In contemporary ‘post-secular society’, videogames like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock Infinite or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious elements. Departing from a critique on studies perceiving such in-game representations as discriminatory forms of religious Othering, the main research question of this article is: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? The study is based on a qualitative an…
I Am Not a Conspiracy Theorist: Relational Identifications in the Dutch Conspiracy Milieu
Despite their popularity and normalization, the public image of conspiracy theory remains morally tainted. Academics contribute by conceiving of conspiracy theorists as a coherent collective: internal variety is sacrificed for a clear external demarcation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, we explore variation in the conspiracy milieu through people's own self-understanding. More particularly, we study how these people identif…
From the unbelievable to the undeniable: Epistemological pluralism, or how conspiracy theorists legitimate their extraordinary truth claims
Despite their stigma, conspiracy theories are hugely popular today and have pervaded mainstream culture. Increasingly, such theories expanded into large master schemes of deceit where ‘everything is connected’. Moving beyond discussions of their truthfulness, we study in this article how such ‘super conspiracy theories’ are made plausible. We strategically selected the case study of David Icke – a true celebrity in conspiracy circles and main pro…
Game over? Negotiating modern capitalism in virtual game worlds
Johan Huizinga’s claim that commercialization threatens the self-enclosed ‘magic circle’ of free play still permeates many contemporary games studies. Critiquing such generalizing and essentialistic assumptions, this article distinguishes four different ‘orders of commercialization’ that impinge on online game worlds and studies empirically how each of these is evaluated and negotiated by players themselves. Based on an analysis of World of Warcr…
Debating (in) echo chambers: How culture shapes communication in conspiracy theory networks on YouTube
The ubiquity of social media platforms fuels heated discussions about algorithms and selection biases leading people into online “echo chambers.” Scholars argue that social media deepen societal polarization and fuel political extremism. However, studies often focus on media effects, disregarding individual agency and (sub)cultural values that shape communication. As a strategic case study, this article, based on a mixed-methods analysis, includi…
The Corona Truth Wars: Epistemic Disputes and Societal Conflicts around a Pandemic—An Introduction to the Special Issue
Ever since the start of the Corona pandemic, different and often conflicting views have emerged about the virus and how to appropriately deal with it. Such epistemic, societal, and economic criticisms, including those about government imposed measures, have often been dismissed as dangerous forms of conspiratorial disinformation that should be (and have been) excluded from the realm of reasonable political discussion. However, since these critiqu…
We are what we click: Understanding time and content-based habits of online news readers
The article contributes both conceptually and methodologically to the study of online news consumption by introducing new approaches to measuring user information behaviour and proposing a typology of users based on their click behaviour. Using as a case study two online outlets of large national newspapers, it employs computational approaches to detect patterns in time- and content-based user interactions with news content based on clickstream d…
Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames
In contemporary ‘post-secular society’, videogames like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock Infinite or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious elements. Departing from a critique on studies perceiving such in-game representations as discriminatory forms of religious Othering, the main research question of this article is: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? The study is based on a qualitative an…
Gods in World of Warcraft exist’: Religious reflexivity and the quest for meaning in online computer games
In ‘secular’ Western societies, religious topics permeate media texts of books, films, series and games and such texts even inform several religious-spiritual movements. Critically expanding on theories about ‘fiction-based religion’, ‘invented religion’ or ‘hyper-real religion’, this article studies if, how and why players of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft reflect on religious narratives in the game…
The Revenge of the Machines: On Modernity, Digital Technology and Animism
The classical assumption that scientific and technological progress are the main driving forces behind, what Weber called, the 'disenchantment of the western world', is basic knowledge in contemporary sociology. In this paper, however, it is argued that the implementation of digital technology also stimulates the religious, or more specific, animistic imagination. A qualitative analysis of Wired magazine (1993-2000) shows that various computer sp…
Threat or menace to media pluralism? A framework to assess alternative conspiracy media in today’s information landscape
In this article, we examine recent changes in Western media landscapes that witnessed the emergence of alternative conspiracy media critiquing the epistemic hegemony of legacy media, and explore ways to analyze whether they contribute to or hinder democratic discourse. This pressing question depends not only on the empirical manifestations of such media outlets, but also on the ideal conceptualization of media pluralism, which is contingent upon …
Picturing Opaque Power: How Conspiracy Theorists Construct Oppositional Videos on YouTube
Conspiracy theories were once perceived as delusions of individuals on the fringes of society, but have become commonplace in mainstream culture. Today, they are produced, consumed, and circulated on various online media environments. From memes on 4chan, QAnon influencers on Instagram, to flat earth or antivaxx videos on YouTube, modern-day conspiracy culture embodies compelling mediated images and narratives that are composed of various audiovi…
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories are an integral part of contemporary societies, yet sociological research on the topic is still scarce. This is particularly problematic because conspiracy theories are not just theoretical ideas formulated in the abstract but are lived social and cultural phenomena that beg for more sociological analysis and explanation. In this entry, we review the history of the academic study of conspiracy theories, moving from pathologiza…
Beyond the domestication of nature? Restructuring the relationship between nature and technology in car commercials
It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known…
Don’t Look Up: Satirical cli-fi movies as a catalyst for online environmental debate
In a post-truth context where environmental claims of scientists and politicians are increasingly contested, this article explores how satirical climate fiction facilitates the imagination of and engagement with climate change. Taking Don’t Look Up (2021) as a case study, it presents a thematic analysis of 640 Reddit contributions. The analysis reveals that the movie served as a meaningful text, decoded in various ways, and invited the audience t…
Reactionary Exiles. How Conspiracy Theorists Deal with Socio-Technological Exclusion
Due to growing public concerns regarding the consequences of disinformation and conspiracy theories, major tech companies have introduced policies to curtail them on their platforms. Until now, the academic debate has largely focused on whether these punitive policies are effective. In this study, we address the question of how de-platformed 'conspiracy theorists' themselves experience and deal with such socio-technological exclusion. Drawing on …
Distrusting Consensus: How a Uniform Corona Pandemic Narrative Fostered Suspicion and Conspiracy Theories
Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics) garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would develop distrusts towards those institutions and the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Their ideas are often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their…
Marketable religion: How game company Ubisoft commodified religion for a global audience
Videogame companies are selling religion to an overwhelmingly secular demographic. Ubisoft, the biggest company in the world’s biggest cultural industry, created a best-selling franchise about a conflict over Biblical artefacts between Muslim Assassins and Christian Templars. Who decides to put religion into those games? How? And why? To find out, we interviewed 22 developers on the Assassin’s Creed franchise, including directors and writers. Bas…
Performing the ‘fun’ self: How members of the Red Hat Society negotiate cultural discourses of femininity and ageing
Since its foundation in 1998 the ‘Red Hat Society’ (RHS) has become a popular international movement of women aged over 50 that is known for its distinct group performances. Red Hatters show up in public spaces wearing red hats, purple clothing and sometimes red gloves, and engage in various fun and frivolous activities. Previous studies about the RHS have found that its main appeal is that it creates an escape from women’s day-to-day life experi…
The Revenge of the Machines: On Modernity, Digital Technology and Animism
The classical assumption that scientific and technological progress are the main driving forces behind, what Weber called, the 'disenchantment of the western world', is basic knowledge in contemporary sociology. In this paper, however, it is argued that the implementation of digital technology also stimulates the religious, or more specific, animistic imagination. A qualitative analysis of Wired magazine (1993-2000) shows that various computer sp…
Game over? Negotiating modern capitalism in virtual game worlds
Johan Huizinga’s claim that commercialization threatens the self-enclosed ‘magic circle’ of free play still permeates many contemporary games studies. Critiquing such generalizing and essentialistic assumptions, this article distinguishes four different ‘orders of commercialization’ that impinge on online game worlds and studies empirically how each of these is evaluated and negotiated by players themselves. Based on an analysis of World of Warcr…
Beyond the domestication of nature? Restructuring the relationship between nature and technology in car commercials
It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercials, this study develops a typology of constellations of nature and technology. Besides the well-known…
The Contentious Gap: From digital divide to cultural beliefs about online interactions
With the rise and widespread application of the internet, social scientists rapidly emphasized that some people were better able to gain control over these technologies than others. This so-called digital divide between the haves and the have-nots was seen as a new feature of contemporary inequality – as a reproduction or transformation of existing social disparities. Motivated by these concerns about social inequality, it is argued in this paper…
Performing the ‘fun’ self: How members of the Red Hat Society negotiate cultural discourses of femininity and ageing
Since its foundation in 1998 the ‘Red Hat Society’ (RHS) has become a popular international movement of women aged over 50 that is known for its distinct group performances. Red Hatters show up in public spaces wearing red hats, purple clothing and sometimes red gloves, and engage in various fun and frivolous activities. Previous studies about the RHS have found that its main appeal is that it creates an escape from women’s day-to-day life experi…
Contesting epistemic authority: Conspiracy theories on the boundaries of science
Conspiracy theories are immensely popular today, yet in the social sciences they are often dismissed as “irrational,” “bad science,” or “religious belief.” In this study, we take a cultural sociological approach and argue that this persistent disqualification is a form of “boundary work” that obscures rather than clarifies how and why conspiracy theorists challenge the epistemic authority of science. Based on a qualitative study of the Dutch cons…
Gods in World of Warcraft exist’: Religious reflexivity and the quest for meaning in online computer games
In ‘secular’ Western societies, religious topics permeate media texts of books, films, series and games and such texts even inform several religious-spiritual movements. Critically expanding on theories about ‘fiction-based religion’, ‘invented religion’ or ‘hyper-real religion’, this article studies if, how and why players of the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft reflect on religious narratives in the game…
I Am Not a Conspiracy Theorist: Relational Identifications in the Dutch Conspiracy Milieu
Despite their popularity and normalization, the public image of conspiracy theory remains morally tainted. Academics contribute by conceiving of conspiracy theorists as a coherent collective: internal variety is sacrificed for a clear external demarcation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, we explore variation in the conspiracy milieu through people's own self-understanding. More particularly, we study how these people identif…
Playing the Other: Role-playing religion in videogames
In contemporary ‘post-secular society’, videogames like Assassin’s Creed, BioShock Infinite or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious elements. Departing from a critique on studies perceiving such in-game representations as discriminatory forms of religious Othering, the main research question of this article is: how does role-playing the (non-)religious Other in games affect the worldview of players? The study is based on a qualitative an…
Mechanisms of Disclosure: A Socio-technical Perspective on Sociality in Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games
It is a mainstay in game studies that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games are boasting social relations and community formation. Considering games as “sociotechnical” environments, this article studies how the usage of external communication technologies in an online video game guild shapes the members’ social dynamics. Based on a one-year ethnographic study of a women’s guild in The Elder Scrolls Online (TESO), the analysis shows tha…
From the unbelievable to the undeniable: Epistemological pluralism, or how conspiracy theorists legitimate their extraordinary truth claims
Despite their stigma, conspiracy theories are hugely popular today and have pervaded mainstream culture. Increasingly, such theories expanded into large master schemes of deceit where ‘everything is connected’. Moving beyond discussions of their truthfulness, we study in this article how such ‘super conspiracy theories’ are made plausible. We strategically selected the case study of David Icke – a true celebrity in conspiracy circles and main pro…
The Corona Truth Wars
The current corona pandemic disrupts the entire world like and threatens not only public health, but our economies, social relations, democracies, rule of law, mental well-being and more. While we may have more understanding of the Sars-Cov-2 virus than half a year ago, much of what it does and how to combat it is still uncertain, despite a dazzling amount of research on it. That may be logical when new issues arise, but the situation is complica…
Contemporary Conspiracy Culture: Truth and Knowledge in an Era of Epistemic Instability
In this ethnographic study, the author takes an agnostic stance towards the truth value of conspiracy theories and delves into the everyday lives of people active in the conspiracy milieu to understand better what the contemporary appeal of conspiracy theories is.Conspiracy theories have become popular cultural products, endorsed and shared by significant segments of Western societies. Yet our understanding of who these people are and why they ar…
Post-human encounters: Humanising the technological Other in videogames
Whether we are talking about Alexa, chat bots or a videogame character, technological artefacts are increasingly being developed to mimic different aspects of being human. However, research on people’s experience with such technologies and the cultural imaginations of what makes them human remains underdeveloped. Guided by a reexamination of the sociocultural concept of the Other, this article empirically studies how and why players humanise non-…
We are what we click: Understanding time and content-based habits of online news readers
The article contributes both conceptually and methodologically to the study of online news consumption by introducing new approaches to measuring user information behaviour and proposing a typology of users based on their click behaviour. Using as a case study two online outlets of large national newspapers, it employs computational approaches to detect patterns in time- and content-based user interactions with news content based on clickstream d…
Conspiracy Theories
Conspiracy theories are an integral part of contemporary societies, yet sociological research on the topic is still scarce. This is particularly problematic because conspiracy theories are not just theoretical ideas formulated in the abstract but are lived social and cultural phenomena that beg for more sociological analysis and explanation. In this entry, we review the history of the academic study of conspiracy theories, moving from pathologiza…
What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth
Many people use conspiracy theories to make sense of a changing world and its ever more complexif social structures (e.g., international financial systems, global bodies of governance), tragic events (e.g., terrorist attacks, man-made catastrophes, or natural disasters), or socio-political and economic issues (e.g., security, migration, distribution of resources, health care). The widespread flourishing of conspiracy theories in this context has …
Against modernist illusions: Why we need more democratic and constructivist alternatives to debunking conspiracy theories
Various societal and academic actors argue that conspiracy theories should be debunked by insisting on the truthfulness of real “facts” provided by established epistemic institutions. But are academic scholars the appropriate actors to correct people’s beliefs and is that the right and most productive thing to do? Drawing on years of ethnographic research experiences in the Dutch conspiracy milieu, I explain in this paper why debunking conspiracy…
Marketable religion: How game company Ubisoft commodified religion for a global audience
Videogame companies are selling religion to an overwhelmingly secular demographic. Ubisoft, the biggest company in the world’s biggest cultural industry, created a best-selling franchise about a conflict over Biblical artefacts between Muslim Assassins and Christian Templars. Who decides to put religion into those games? How? And why? To find out, we interviewed 22 developers on the Assassin’s Creed franchise, including directors and writers. Bas…
Poly-truth, or the limits of pluralism: Popular debates on conspiracy theories in a post-truth era
Conspiracy theories are central to “post-truth” discussions. Official knowledge, backed by science, politics, and media, is distrusted by various people resorting to alternative (conspiratorial) explanations. While elite commentators lament the rise of such “untruths,” we know little of people’s everyday opinions on this topic, despite their societal ramifications. We therefore performed a qualitative content analysis of 522 comments under a Dutc…
Picturing Opaque Power: How Conspiracy Theorists Construct Oppositional Videos on YouTube
Conspiracy theories were once perceived as delusions of individuals on the fringes of society, but have become commonplace in mainstream culture. Today, they are produced, consumed, and circulated on various online media environments. From memes on 4chan, QAnon influencers on Instagram, to flat earth or antivaxx videos on YouTube, modern-day conspiracy culture embodies compelling mediated images and narratives that are composed of various audiovi…
Distrusting Consensus: How a Uniform Corona Pandemic Narrative Fostered Suspicion and Conspiracy Theories
Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics) garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would develop distrusts towards those institutions and the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Their ideas are often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their…
Trust, media, and science in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic
The first global pandemic of the information age has revealed how the coordinated spread of accurate information and the communication of relevant expert knowledge rely on functioning media channels, platforms, and institutions. As such, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, and sometimes even catalyzed, longer-running societal processes through which traditional gatekeepers of scientific truth and expertise have been challenged or side-stepped, …
Debating (in) echo chambers: How culture shapes communication in conspiracy theory networks on YouTube
The ubiquity of social media platforms fuels heated discussions about algorithms and selection biases leading people into online “echo chambers.” Scholars argue that social media deepen societal polarization and fuel political extremism. However, studies often focus on media effects, disregarding individual agency and (sub)cultural values that shape communication. As a strategic case study, this article, based on a mixed-methods analysis, includi…
The Corona Truth Wars: Epistemic Disputes and Societal Conflicts around a Pandemic—An Introduction to the Special Issue
Ever since the start of the Corona pandemic, different and often conflicting views have emerged about the virus and how to appropriately deal with it. Such epistemic, societal, and economic criticisms, including those about government imposed measures, have often been dismissed as dangerous forms of conspiratorial disinformation that should be (and have been) excluded from the realm of reasonable political discussion. However, since these critiqu…
Sociology (29 works) · Political science (24 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Law (19 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (18 works) · Politics (15 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Law (12 works) · Social science (12 works) · Psychology (10 works)