1.00 p.m. (PT) | UCLA, Sociology Department

Thomas Mann Fellow Nils Christian Kumkar outlines his project on Conspiracy Theories and their production as a collaborative social process at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Conspiracy theories have received attention in public debates and research. What has not been explored and theorized is their production as a collaborative social process, and especially their complex social functions in different communicative contexts - everyday interactions, social media conversations, party politics, political protest communication, and others. This presentation outlines this gap and proposes to fill it by shifting the focus from believing in conspiracy theories to the problem of doing conspiracy theories. This perspective has the potential to improve our understanding of the current conjuncture of conspiracy theorizing as a conjuncture of freewheeling (empty) antagonism, and thus to prove insightful for understanding the production of contentious political knowledge more generally.

Attendance

Attendance by invitation only.

Participants

Nils C. Kumkar studied sociology and economics in Göttingen and spent a year abroad at UCLA. In 2016, he completed his doctorate at the Leipzig DFG Research Training Group “Critical Junctures of Globalization” with a thesis on crisis protests in the USA and Germany. Since 2016, he has been a research associate at SOCIUM in Bremen, where he researches and publishes on political conflict, social inequality, digitalization, alternative facts, and conspiracy theories.