5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Digital platforms, such as blogs, Websites, Internet forums or social media, have crucially contributed to the circulation of disinformation or alternative truthmaking. They represent central spaces of exchange for social actors who turn to conspiration theories and reject “mainstream” forms of knowledge proposed by institutions such as the media, academia or the state. If heterogeneous in their beliefs, they have come to form epistemological communities with cosmologies of their own, as observed by an increasing number of social scientists over the last years. This session proposes to address the central importance of digital infrastructures in the (re-)making of these communities and to reflect on digital ethnography as a methodological tool and its capacity to apprehend both the formation of such groups and the critique they utter towards society at large, on- and offline. The questions we are interested in exploring include (but are not limited to) the following:

-The benefits of digital ethnography in the study of conspiration groups, its limitations, methodological and ethical challenges, as well as relationship to offline forms of conspiracy belief

- The relationship between digital infrastructures and communities co-producing counter-knowledge

-The political and social conjuncture that shapes online conspiracy theory making

-The relationship between sociological “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Ricoeur) and the suspicious knowledge forms displayed in the digital conspiration scene