Clare Birchall at the Keynote Series of the Doctorate in Contemporary Studies

Clare Birchall, professor of Contemporary Culture at King’s College London, is our next guest at the Axes of Interdisciplinary Knowledge – Keynote Series of the Doctorate in Contemporary Studies (DEC), with a communication entitled "Researching Conspiracy Theories".

This lecture will be held in English and will also be broadcasted through the Zoom platform and the CEIS20 Youtube channel.

In this talk, I will discuss my ongoing research into conspiracy theories. My first book, Knowledge Goes Pop, was published in 2006. Since that time, conspiracy theorizing has shifted from being a predominantly countercultural, parapolitical critique and/or entertaining mode to a discourse weaponised by the alt- and far-right. I will talk about three different grant-funded research projects that seek to illuminate the technological, cultural and political changes that have contributed to this reconfiguration of conspiracy theories.

Clare Birchall is professor of Contemporary Culture at King’s College London. She is the author of Knowledge Goes Pop: From Conspiracy Theory to Gossip, and Radical Secrecy: The Ends of Transparency in Datafied America. With Peter Knight, she is the co-author of Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19. She is currently the PI on a three-year CHANSE-funded grant, "Researching Europe, Digitalisation, and Conspiracy Theories"; and the Co-I on a three-year AHRC-funded project called "Everything is Connected: What Difference has the Internet made to Conspiracy Theories?".