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"Conspiracy/Theory, edited by Joseph Masco and Lisa Wedeen, examines the proliferation of conspiracy theories across the globe, demonstrating across historical periods and state projects the vital place of speculation in making and evaluating collective conditions. The essays explore the genealogical and theoretical overlaps between "conspiracy" and "critical theory," moving beyond a US focus to think in multi-sited and implicitly comparative ways about the conspiracy theories in circulation today. The volume's four sections address central theoretical issues such as knowledge production, community formation, political violence, social control, democracy, and the meaning of engaging in theoretically informed scholarship"--

"Conspiracy Theory Discourses addresses a crucial phenomenon in the current political and communicative context: conspiracy theories. The social impact of conspiracy theories is wide-ranging and their influence on the political life of many nations is increasing. Conspiracy Theory Discourses bridges an important gap by bringing discourse-based insights to existing knowledge about conspiracy theories, which has so far developed in research areas other than Linguistics and Discourse Studies. The chapters in this volume call attention to conspiracist discourses as deeply ingrained ways to interpret reality and construct social identities. They are based on multiple, partly overlapping analytical frameworks, including Critical Discourse Analysis, rhetoric, metaphor studies, multimodality, and corpus-based, quali-quantitative approaches. These approaches are an entry point to further explore the environments which enable the proliferation of conspiracy theory, and the paramount role of discourse in furthering conspiracist interpretations of reality"--

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ILLUSTRATIONS AND TABLES -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION. High-Crime Blind -- 1 The Conspiracy-Theory Label -- 2 The American Tradition of Conspiracy Belief -- 3 Conspiracy Denial in the Social Sciences -- 4 The Conspiracy-Theory Conspiracy -- 5 State Crimes against Democracy -- 6 Restoring American Democracy -- APPENDIX. CIA DISPATCH #1035-960 -- TABLES -- NOTES -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX

This volume bridges an important gap by bringing discourse-based insights to existing knowledge about conspiracy theories, which has so far developed in research areas other than Linguistics and Discourse Studies. The chapters call attention to conspiracist discourses as deeply ingrained ways to interpret reality and construct social identities.

Conspiracy theory as a theoretical framework has emerged only in the last twenty years; commentators are finding it a productive way to explain the actions and thoughts of individuals and societies. In this compelling exploration of Latin literature, Pagán uses conspiracy theory to illuminate the ways that elite Romans invoked conspiracy as they navigated the hierarchies, divisions, and inequalities in their society. By seeming to uncover conspiracy everywhere, Romans could find the need to crush slave revolts, punish rivals with death or exile, dismiss women, denigrate foreigners, or view their emperors with deep suspicion. Expanding on her earlier Conspiracy Narratives in Roman History, Pagán here interprets the works of poets, satirists, historians, and orators—Juvenal, Tacitus, Suetonius, Terence, and Cicero, among others—to reveal how each writer gave voice to fictional or real actors who were engaged in intrigue and motivated by a calculating worldview. Delving into multiple genres, Pagán offers a powerful critique of how conspiracy and conspiracy theory can take hold and thrive when rumor, fear, and secrecy become routine methods of interpreting (and often distorting) past and current events. In Roman society, where knowledge about others was often lacking and stereotypes dominated, conspiracy theory explained how the world worked. The persistence of conspiracy theory, from antiquity to the present day, attests to its potency as a mechanism for confronting the frailties of the human condition.

AbstractIn much of the current academic and public discussion, conspiracy theories are portrayed as a negative phenomenon, linked to misinformation, mistrust in experts and institutions, and political propaganda. Rather surprisingly, however, philosophers working on this topic have been reluctant to incorporate a negatively evaluative aspect when either analyzing or engineering the concept conspiracy theory. In this paper, we present empirical data on the nature of the concept conspiracy theory from five studies designed to test the existence, prevalence and exact form of an evaluative dimension to the ordinary concept conspiracy theory. These results reveal that, while there is a descriptive concept of conspiracy theory, the predominant use of conspiracy theory is deeply evaluative, encoding information about epistemic deficiency and often also derogatory and disparaging information. On the basis of these results, we present a new strategy for engineering conspiracy theory to promote theoretical investigations and institutional discussions of this phenomenon. We argue for engineering conspiracy theory to encode an epistemic evaluation, and to introduce a descriptive expression—such as 'conspiratorial explanation'—to refer to the purely descriptive concept conspiracy theory.

Henning Melber challenges Ludo de Witte who claims to reveal the "true role" of Dag Hammarskjöld "in the imperialist catastrophe that savaged the Congo". Melber argues that De Witte's blog offers no new empirical evidence, and demonstrates a failure to understand global institutions and the role of individuals within them. He argues Ludo de Witte shows a total denial of local dynamics and agency, which has led to misperceptions bordering on conspiracy theories.
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Looks at links between conspiracy theories & aspects of the human sciences to argue that their narrative structures are basically the same. Human science & conspiracy theories both try to furnish explanatory myths for mass societies by exposing "hidden" schemes that caused certain events/circumstances to occur. The prevalence of current conspiracy theories surrounding events such as the death of Princess Diana, the TWA 800 crash, & Waco (TX) are compared with human science theories to show that they share the same narrative structure. For example, the classical sociological thinkers called on capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism, human nature, & mythological structures to explain what had previously not been understood, & these explanations usually exposed machinations at work "behind people's backs." The general atmosphere in the current "age of anxiety" is explored to suggest that the need to theorize situations is part of a culture that requires explanations for everything. The possibility of an alternative way of thinking that avoids searching for a single explanation in favor of disseminating as many wild explanations as possible is discussed. 34 References. J. Lindroth