Project description
Exploring conspiracy theories in post-socialist cultures
During the Covid-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories became more prominent and visible than ever, attracting unprecedented attention from journalists and scholars alike. However, existing research tends to treat conspiracy theories in historical isolation, overlooking their reliance on earlier events, experiences and narrative templates. The EU-funded CONSPIRATORIALMEMORY project aims to overcome this limitation, focusing on conspiracy stories and images in Central and Eastern European literature, film, television, commemorative rituals and online culture between 2010 and 2020. The project's work will centre on conspiratorial cultural imaginations from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, exploring how debates about the socialist past shape conspiracy-based cultural engagements with recent political events. The project also draws comparisons with conspiracy culture from Western Europe and the United States.
Objective
Academic inquiry into conspiracy theories is unquestionably on the rise. Since the turn of the millennium, a new generation of scholars has released conspiracy theory from its earlier associations with individual pathologies, and has shifted attention to its wider social and cultural functioning. Notwithstanding these developments, existing research still tends to treat conspiracy theories in historical and cultural isolation, overlooking their reliance on earlier events and narrative templates, and neglecting their – increasingly digital – transnational dynamic. Focusing on conspiratorial stories and images in Central and East European literature, film, television, commemorative rituals and online culture, during the period 2010-2020, CONSPIRATORIALMEMORY aims to overcome these limitations. The project elucidates the historical references, the transnational interactions and the online circulations that give conspiracy theories their rhetorical and emotional momentum in the post-socialist era. Relying on a theoretical framework that enriches the emerging field of conspiracy theory studies with affect studies and cultural memory studies, the project zooms in on conspiracy-based cultural imaginations from Poland, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus regarding three transnational events that have recently been at the center of international political tensions. Subprojects 1, 2 and 3 each focus on the conspiracy cultures around one of these events, employing the qualitative methodology of Cultural Analysis to examine the intersecting discourses of memory and suspicion. Subproject 4 uses quantitative digital media research methods to analyze the medium-specific contributions of online platforms to memory-based conspiratorial imaginations. The Project Synthesis compares the modes and media of expression in the examined cases, and addresses their parallels with cultural imaginations of conspiracy from Western Europe and the United States.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- medical and health sciences basic medicine pathology
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
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ERC-STG - Starting Grant
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Call for proposal
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1012WX Amsterdam
Netherlands
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