{"id":14261,"date":"2024-04-04T12:51:11","date_gmt":"2024-04-04T10:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging-v2.kulturwissenschaften.de\/?post_type=veranstaltung&#038;p=14261"},"modified":"2024-05-16T12:00:42","modified_gmt":"2024-05-16T10:00:42","slug":"colloquium-2024","status":"publish","type":"veranstaltung","link":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/veranstaltung\/colloquium-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"The Conspiracist Zeitgeist:"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the past decade, and especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories have surged from the fringes of society into the forefront of the public mainstream. The advent of information and communication technologies has not only facilitated but also <em>democratized<\/em> the continuous production, diffusion, and evaluation of conspiratorial ideas, tropes, and narratives \u201cfrom below\u201d, leading to the emergence of <em>grassroots conspiracism<\/em>. Accordingly, platformization and gamification have enabled conspiracists to employ participatory, interactive, horizontal, collaborative, decentralized, and intertextual meaning-making and knowledge-production practices in the development of conspiracy theories. With \u201ctruth\u201d imagined as being hidden behind veils of deception and machinations of the establishment, it is unsurprising that right-wing conspiracism has become an alternative mode of explanation for the non-transparent workings of the power elite \u2013 an idea which has traditionally been critiqued from the left as a structural problem of late capitalism. Therefore, the <em>conspiracist zeitgeist<\/em> does not signify an era dominated by conspiracy theories but rather an era where conspiracy <em>theorizing<\/em> is prevalent; it is not a specific conspiracy theory characterizing this <em>zeitgeist<\/em>, but rather the growing need to produce conspiracy theories \u201cfrom below\u201d as a form of social critique. This paper delves into three analytical procedures central to collective conspiracy theorizing in the digital era: <em>radical skepticism<\/em> (\u201cnothing is what it seems\u201d), <em>total evidentialism<\/em> (\u201ceverything is evidence\u201d), and <em>na\u00efve transcendentism<\/em> (\u201ctruth is out there\u201d).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","event_category":[45,460],"class_list":["post-14261","veranstaltung","type-veranstaltung","status-publish","hentry","event_category-colloquium","event_category-events-in-english"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltung\/14261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/veranstaltung"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/veranstaltung"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"event_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kulturwissenschaften.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/event_category?post=14261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}