A Socio-Historical Perspective for the Study of Conspiracy Movements

John Mirsky, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Conspiracy movements—mobilizations of people united by a shared belief in a conspiracy theory and a shared desire to expose and subvert this conspiracy (Halford 2023: 188) provide a rich case for sociological study. The stakes of combating their spread are politically significant and their examination can teach us much about the contemporary social world as conspiracy theorists are a population unusually excited to explain their worldview to others. While contemporary studies of conspiracy theories have typically been the domain of psychologists who argue that conspiratorial frameworks are most often adopted by highly emotional, low SES individuals that are susceptible to psychological fallacies and scholars that highlight the particularities of New Media, I argue that the sociological literatures of the “cultural turn” of state formation and on comparative-historical methods offer distinctive historical insights into the study of the Anti-vaccine and QAnon movements. Through qualitative analysis of cultural texts created by QAnon and anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists, trends stemming from a capitalist mode of production and the political reforms in 16th-century Europe are located as fruitful historically imbedded avenues for scholarship.

See paper

 Presented in Session 144. Cultural Practices and Collective Mobilization