Convenors
Luca Sterchele, University of Bologna
luca.sterchele2@unibo.it (corresponding scholar)
Lorenzo Picarella, University of Bologna
lorenzo.picarella2@unibo.it
Public and scientific discourse has long framed conspiracy communities as pathological, irrational or para-political (Baća, 2024). Yet a growing body of scientific work has recently called to “take conspiracy seriously”, reframing conspiracy milieux as sophisticated sites of collective meaning-making (Bertuzzi, 2021, Grodzicka and Harambam, 2021).
The very category of “conspiracy” is itself a contested and political label, and understanding how certain explanations of the world come to be delegitimised as “conspirationist” – by media, institutions, and digital platforms alike – is a crucial starting point for the field (Navarini, 2026). Conspiracy cultures, though deeply heterogeneous, share a suspicion towards the “hidden workings of power” and maintain a complex, ambivalent relationship with legacy media accounts. Far from being primarily engaged in the fabrication of “fake news” (a label whose problematic nature becomes fully evident in this field), these communities are better understood as “epistemic communities” (Baća, 2024; Crabu et al, 2024), collectives favouring “home-grown” forms of meaning-making and “expertise”, produced through practices of “alternative investigation” (Marwick and Partin, 2024). This requires recognising their audiences not as passive consumers of “misinformation” but as active and productive agents (Lavorgna, 2021), engaged in ongoing practices of bricolage through which complex social, political, and natural phenomena are made sense of via continuous social reconstructions of reality (Harambam, 2020).
Ethnographic and qualitative approaches offer a uniquely powerful lens onto these dynamics, allowing researchers to move beyond the binary of truth/falsehood and to attend instead to the situated practices, vocabularies, and forms of sociability through which conspiratorial knowledge is produced and lived (cf. Harambam, 2020; Saglam, 2024). Ethnography makes it possible to follow the everyday, granular work of interpretation, debate, and community-building through which conspiracy communities take shape, capturing the affective and performative dimensions of “alternative investigation” in their making (Marwick and Partin, 2024; West and Sanders, 2003). Attending to digital environments – forums, chats, livestreams, social media platforms – as much as to face-to-face settings – gatherings, protests, informal encounters – and, crucially, to the entanglement between the two, allows researchers to trace how epistemic frames circulate, are embodied, negotiated, and reinforced (or contested) across increasingly hybrid spaces of belief. Combining these dimensions allows us to approach conspiracy not simply as a set of beliefs but as a lived, relational, and increasingly hybrid social practice (Harambam, 2020; Forberg, 2022; Navarini, 2026).
Moving toward an interpretive engagement, this call for paper aims to ask how alternative explanations of the world are constructed, sustained, and propagated within communities, both online and offline, and how such practices shape forms of sociality, identity and politics.
Open questions
- Epistemic communities: how do conspiracy groups organise themselves as collective knowledge-producing communities, and what forms of authority, expertise, and legitimacy do they construct internally?
- Pathways into conspiracy: what social, biographical, or affective trajectories lead individuals to encounter and become involved in conspiracy communities, and what needs – epistemic, relational, or identity-based – do these communities appear to satisfy?
- Alternative investigation: what methods, practices, and vocabularies do conspiracy communities mobilise to conduct their own forms of research, and how do these practices compare with – or mimic – institutional and scientific ones?
- Bricolage and sense-making: how do individuals act as “bricoleurs”, drawing on heterogeneous cultural, political, and religious resources to interpret complex events?
- Delegitimisation and labelling: through what social, political, and media processes do certain explanations of the world come to be labelled and dismissed as “conspirationist”, and with what consequences for those who hold them?
- Online-offline nexus: how do conspiratorial beliefs and practices circulate between digital platforms and face-to-face spaces, and what continuities or ruptures emerge between online communities and offline gatherings?
- Doing ethnography of conspiracy: what specific methodological and ethical challenges arise when conducting ethnography – digital, in-person, or both – within conspiracy communities, and how can researchers navigate their own positionality in relation to contested truths?
Keywords
Conspiracy theories; misinformation; alternative science; racial conspiracism; manosphere and gender conspiracism; conspiracy epistemic communities; epistemic authority
Sub-disciplines / cross-disciplinary areas
Cultural Studies; Science and Technology Studies; Political Sociology/Anthropology; Sociology of knowledge; Criminology
References
Baća, B. (2024), Qanon and the epistemic communities of the unreal: a conceptual toolkit for a sociology of grassroots conspiracism. Theory, Culture & Society, 41(4), 111-132.
Bertuzzi, N. (2021). Conspiracy theories and social movements studies: A research agenda. Sociology Compass, 15(12), 1-16.
Crabu, S., Neresini, F., Agodi, M.C., Tosoni, S. (2024). Introduction: Manufacturing Knowledge at the Border of Science. In F. Neresini, M.C. Agodi, S. Crabu, S. Tosoni (eds), Manufacturing Refused Knowledge in the Age of Epistemic Pluralism. Singapore: Palgrave MacMillan.
Forberg, P. L. (2022). From the fringe to the fore: an algorithmic ethnography of the far-right conspiracy theory group QAnon. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, 51(3), 291-317.
Grodzicka, E. D., & Harambam, J. (2021). What should academics do about conspiracy theories? Moving beyond debunking to better deal with conspiratorial movements, misinformation and post-truth. Journal for Cultural Research, 25(1), 1-11.
Harambam, J. (2020). Contemporary conspiracy culture: Truth and knowledge in an era of epistemic instability. London: Routledge.
Lavorgna, A. (2021). Information pollution as social harm: Investigating the digital drift of medical misinformation in a time of crisis. Emerald Group Publishing.
Marwick, A. E., & Partin, W. C. (2024). Constructing alternative facts: Populist expertise and the QAnon conspiracy. New Media & Society, 26(5), 2535-2555.
Navarini, G. (2026). Boycotts, mockery, and leaders under attack: on the uses of “conspiracy” in political and journalistic discourse. In G. Navarini (eds), Conspiracy Theories in Contemporary Italy Cultural Production and Political Uses. London: Routledge.
Saglam, E. (2024). Conspiracy theories as productive practices: toward a theory of conspiratorial style, agency, and politics. Annual Review of Anthropology, 53(1), 261-275.
West H.G., Sanders T. (eds) (2003) Transparency and Conspiracy: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Convenors’ bio
Luca Sterchele is currently a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Bologna, where he is conducting ethnographic research on conspiracy communities in the fields of health and science. He has previously carried out ethnographic research in the fields of prison studies and mental health, focusing on the role of expert knowledge in the medical-psychiatric field and its intersections with legal and penal apparatuses.
Lorenzo Picarella (PhD) is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Sociology of Deviance at the University of Bologna, where he works within the FIS Consolidator project eDeTox (Deconstructing Antisocial Behaviour and Toxic Communication Online). His research focuses on online deviance and crime, with particular attention to how deviant and criminal practices are organised through digital platforms. His work primarily employs qualitative methods, including digital ethnography, qualitative content analysis, and discursive interviews. He is currently conducting ethnographic research on online communities characterised by racist and misogynistic content.