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Part of
Conspiracy Theory Discourses
Edited by Massimiliano Demata, Virginia Zorzi and Angela Zottola
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 98] 2022
► pp. 71–98

Chapter 4
“Go ahead and ‘debunk’ truth by calling it a conspiracy theory”

The discursive construction of conspiracy theoryness in online affinity spaces

| University of North Carolina
| Swansea University

To help fill in the research gap on conspiracy theorizing online (Varis 2019), this chapter addresses two research questions: the discursive construction of conspiracy theoryness in online affinity spaces (Gee 2005) and the extent to which these discursive constructions are aligned with those previously identified by extant literature, which has traditionally taken a top-down, macro-level perspective, as defining of conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are essentially social constructs (Butter and Knight 2016). To our knowledge, research to date has not examined how notions of what counts as a conspiracy theory are shaped in a bottom-up manner as knowledge, identities, and associated practices that are subjected to discursive struggle. Online affinity spaces, such as those provided by Reddit and YouTube and in which conspiracy theories are regularly discussed, give us unprecedented access to this process. Our analysis shows how the discursive construction of knowledge is crucially related to the concept of truth and how, contrary to common representations, conspiracy theories are seen – from an emic perspective – as stemming from rationality, reasoning, and deployment of an (albeit sui generis) scientific method. Although committed to knowledge activism, conspiracy theories in our data display a manifest proclivity for eudaimonic and social variables and lean strongly towards the depiction of the agents’ identity (both human and non-human) against whom conspiracy theorists relationally construct who they are.

Keywords: conspiracy theory, online affinity spaces, knowledge construction, identity
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theorising in and about conspiracy theories
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Framework
    • 3.2Data
      • 3.2.1Data selection and collection
      • 3.2.2Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Constructing knowledge about conspiracy theories
    • 4.2Factual-conceptual knowledge
    • 4.3Procedural knowledge
    • 4.4Meta-cognitive (identity) knowledge
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 1 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.98.04gar
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