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.
