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

From climate change, migration and geopolitics to vaccinations, aliens and supranational organizations (UN, WHO, WEF), in today’s mediatized information landscape, official truths provided by mainstream epistemic authorities are increasingly challenged by various actors and from diverse pockets of society. From YouTube video makers and Instagram spirituality celebrities conveying their alternative visions on reality, to organized disinformation attacks by bots and troll farms engaged in geopolitical warfare, today’s internet is a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of knowledge contestations.

And they resonate with large swaths of populations across the world: conspiracy theories thrive and alternative media outlets attract many viewers, at the same time, conspiratorial rumours circulate on covert digital media such as Telegram and Signal. But at the heart of this information crisis, often dubbed post-truth, is a crisis of trust. Many citizens lack trust in the epistemic authorities to provide reliable and truthful information about the world, and put more faith in their competitors. Yet, most post-truth analyses focus on technological determinants: platform affordances and filtering algorithms.

In this session, we invite sociological analyses on these matters that go beyond the common positivist deficit model which conceptualizes such knowledge contestations hierarchically as the result of irrationality, manipulation and cognitive biases. Instead, we opt for studies that foreground everyday meaning making from a neutral or symmetrical perspective in order to understand how people navigate today’s complex mediatized information landscape. We invite empirical and theoretical studies aiming to shed sociological light on digital truth contestations and conspiracy culture broadly.