From Epistemic Work to Resilience Training: Problematisations and Approaches in the Counter-Conspiracy Ecosystem

Politics and the media often discuss the knowledge conflicts we face today under the umbrella term of conspiracy theories. Thus, conspiracy theories are not always used to conceptualise a distinctive incident but also serve as a common signifier for a bunch of political, informational and epistemological phenomena. In recent years, however, various approaches that aim to tackle conspiracy theories have been funded and implemented by authorities at the European, national, and regional levels as well as by the media, NGOs, and social networking platforms. It comes as no surprise that all of those stakeholders are embedded in their respective fields and use different concepts and semantics.

In the cross-European research project “REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation and Conspiracy Theories” we examine these different approaches. We aim at figuring out how the people who conduct them understand the phenomena of conspiracy theories and disinformation and how hegemonic perspectives in social science on a national level translate into different approaches across regions. For this purpose, we conducted about 80 semi-structured expert interviews with individuals working in institutions, the media, and NGOs.

In my paper, I will first provide a typology of our interlocutors, their understandings, and the approaches they apply and second show how institutional settings and funding shape the implementation and continuation of projects. Drawing on a Sociology of Knowledge and Grounded Theory approach, I will further show that conspiracy theories serve as five different problematisations in what I call the Counter-Conspiracy Ecosystem: They are perceived (and tackled) as hate speech, as a political current, as a rhetorical tool, as a social identity and as a belief system. My research contributes to understanding why limited models of how conspiracy theories work necessarily persist in certain fields.