The MAP-MISINFO fellowship explored the intersection of misinformation and media research practices, with particular attention to 1) conjunctural changes in institutional journalism and how it is researched in connection to misinformation; and 2) rural, religious, and partisan media contexts in connection to misinformation.The first workstream comprised of continued work on two related book projects. The first, currently titled the Anti-Disinformation Assemblage, is jointly written with a team of international journalism scholars. It draws from 60+ interviews with fact checkers, editorial actors, platform representatives, and NGO representatives, and focuses on the rise and struggles of fact checking misinformation en masse on social media platforms. The second book project is a solo monograph that examines privacy debates in the 2010s as a precursor to current political and economic approaches to misinformation and democracy.
Focusing on Utah (a region in the USA) as a case study, the project’s second work stream focused on empirically mapping misinformation-related dynamics within an alternative media ecosystem. This ecosystem is deeply shaped by rurality, significant broadcast dependencies, and the institutional and cultural presence of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. This research stream included two intensive data collection phases before and after the 2024 presidential elections. As detailed in this report, data was collected through both on-the-ground ethnographic methods as well as large scale live audio streaming. This research stream entailed the convening an international pre‑conference at the 2024 American Sociological Association in Montreal (‘On‑The‑Ground Research with the Right in 2024’). A closed-door follow up workshop was held at the University of Copenhagen’s Fulgsang Manor (Lolland) in June 2025.
