Paper short abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the sociopolitical divide in the United States, further undermining any sense of a world in common. Drawing on analytic insight from philosopher C.S. Peirce, this talk considers prospects for “Redemption” by examining Reddit’s infamous “Herman Cain Award” community.

Paper long abstract:

Hosted on the Reddit website, the “Herman Cain Award” (HCA) subreddit is an online community that tracks COVID-19-related deaths among COVID-deniers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers who had publicly denied the reality of the virus and/or the effectiveness of public health measures against it. In the fall of 2021, the subreddit gained media exposure and public notoriety for celebrating the deaths of disproportionately conservative and Republican victims of the virus. This notoriety led to the rapid growth of the community—today, with nearly 500,000 members—which is symptomatic of a society deeply divided by crisis. However, the HCA community also includes a sub-category, called the “Redemption Award,” that is conferred to nominees who publicly changed their minds about COVID-19, typically because of near-death encounters with the virus. This talk draws on a broader examination of 68 “Redemption Awards,” focusing on transformative learning experiences as narrated by former COVID-deniers in their encounters with the virus. The phenomenology of encounter with the virus, including its devastating physiological and emotional effects, illustrates learning experiences that simultaneously ignite profound reorientations to the virus, medical practice, and wider community. These narratives are analyzed with reference to C.S. Peirce’s account of “self-consciousness”—as interactionally emerging in the nexus of self, world, and other—and his approach to the politics of science, or the “method of experience” that he counterposes to authoritarian forms of knowledge, that has been neglected in anthropological scholarship.