Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe

Project Information

CONSPIRATORIALMEMORY

Grant agreement ID: 949918

DOI

10.3030/949918

Project closed

EC signature date 12 November 2020

Start date 1 February 2021

End date 31 January 2026

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 487 090,00

EU contribution

€ 1 487 090,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - CONSPIRATORIALMEMORY (Cultures of Suspicion in Post-Socialist Europe)

Reporting period: 2024-02-01 to 2025-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

CONSPRIATORIALMEMORY (949918) researches the interplay between cultural memory and conspiracy theories in Eastern European film, literature, museums, public ceremonies, and online culture. The project resists historically isolated approaches and nationally focused perspectives, and turns away from a tradition that treats the conspiracy outlook as an individual pathology. Instead, our team investigates conspiracy theory as a politically influential cultural practice.
The project’s objective is to elucidate the commemorative gestures, the transnational interactions, and the digital circulations that give conspiracy theory its rhetorical and emotional momentum in the twenty-first century.
To realize this goal, the project:
1. analyzes how post-socialist cultural imaginations of conspiracy derive their interpretative logic and emotional force from conflicting narratives about the socialist past;
2. reveals the modes and media by which memory-based conspiracy stories circulate in transnational contexts.

Zooming in on four Eastern European case studies, the team members use qualitative methods of cultural analysis to examine how (conflicting) narratives about the past determine conspiracy culture’s hermeneutic practices, horizons of expectation, and affective attachments. In addition – employing quantitative digital methods – the project investigates the circulations of conspiratorial memory across media environments and national borders. It analyzes how these migrations are facilitated and shaped by the specific affordances of online platforms.
Central to the project is its commitment to a deeper academic understanding of the role that history (or its mythologized versions) plays in (state-supported and grassroots) conspiracy narratives.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The research has so far centered on the four case studies that make up the project:
Subproject 1 analyzes conspiracy-based cultural imaginations around the 2010 crash of the Tupolev-Tu-154M aircraft near Smolensk (Russia) in which president Lech Kaczyński died, along with his wife and more than 90 members of the Polish political and military elite. Subproject 2 focuses on memory and conspiracy narratives regarding the 1986 catastrophe at the Chornobyl nuclear power plant. Subproject 3 investigates cultural engagements with the Russian war in Ukraine, analyzing the ways in which conspiracy theory and cultural memory are turned into interpretative lenses, in ways resonating with wider “post-truth” sensibilities. And finally, subproject 4 investigates conspiratorial readings of the Soviet past and the Soviet Union’s demise on Russian-language social media platforms. It combines qualitative analysis with a pronounced quantitative element, taking a Digital Methods approach to issues researched in the subprojects.

Among other activities, we have developed and finetuned our multidisciplinary theoretical framework, as well as the concept of “conspiratorial memory”, which we have presented in published articles, organized workshops, conference panels, and (invited) lectures for diverse audiences. Also, for each of the subprojects a comprehensive corpus of materials and data has been compiled, and fieldwork has been conducted in Poland (sites and ceremonies related to the Smolensk air disaster) and Lithuania (Chornobyl-related tourism and heritage and tourism). Different modes of conspiratorial memory have been identified around the cases, each pivoting on different imaginations of the relations between past and present, and involving specific interpretative practices. Our analyses – the first of which now, too, have been published and presented – show how these modes of conspiratorial memory cut across national contexts and media environments, even though they are co-shaped by nationally-specific emphases and by the distinct affordances of cultural, mass, and online media. Analysis of this intricate dynamic is essential for understanding the diverse ways in which conspiratorial memory is currently instrumentalized by populist, ultra-nationalist, and autocratic political actors, in Eastern Europe and beyond.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The research we have conducted so far contributes to a new conceptual vocabulary for the study of conspiracy culture, its “memory work”, its digital and global circulations, and its political co-optation. Specific concepts developed by team members– such as “retro-conspiracism,” “ambient propaganda,” and “conspiratorial memory” – are still work in progress, but contribute much-needed perspectives to contemporary scholarship on cultural memory, conspiracy theory, disinformation, and propaganda. Our conceptual work shows great potential for extrapolation beyond the East-European context.

Apart from proceeding with the research on the project’s four case studies and continuing to publish our findings, we expect to further expand our collaborations with researchers from other knowledge fields. Project members have secured two additional grants from the University of Amsterdam for innovative research into disinformation and propaganda. The grants allow us to advance our interdisciplinary collaborations (e.g. with communication science and philosophy) and add a more pronounced global dimension to our research, while sticking to the ERC project’s focus on East-European conspiracy culture.

Furthermore, we are currently organizing a joint international conference with the CHANSE-funded research project REDACT: Researching Europe, Digitalisation and Conspiracy Theories. This initiative enables cross-fertilizations between two of the main current research projects on conspiracy theories within the (East-)European context.

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