Short Abstract

This panel explores conflicts over conspiracy theories, expertise, and authority. We explore how science scepticism and appraisal, movements propagating conspiracy narratives, spiritual claims, and efforts to counter them converge as culturally grounded responses to the complexities of our worlds.

Long Abstract

Debates over disinformation, conspiracy theories, expertise, and authority have become increasingly charged, often cast as stark oppositions between “science” and “belief,” “reason” and “irrationality,” “democracy” and “populism.” Yet anthropological research shows that these conflicts can rarely be reduced to such simple dichotomies.

For this reason, in this panel we invite ethnographically grounded contributions that not only examine how scepticism, spirituality, and conspiracy intersect with structures of power and inequality, but also analyze how interventions aimed at countering disinformation and conspiracy theories are themselves refracted through everyday lifeworlds and institutional structures. By situating both disinformation and conspiracy theories as well as the efforts to counter them within broader struggles over truth, politics, values, and knowledge, this panel asks what possibilities emerge when polarization is seen not as pathology but as a symptom of deeper fractures and a site of potential repair.

We invite papers exploring how both science skepticism and science appraisal, movements propagating conspiracy narratives, and efforts to counter disinformation converge as culturally and affectively grounded responses to the complexities of our worlds. Together, we hope to explore what these contemporary conflicts over science, health, politics, environment, and culture reveal about our societies and their evolving concerns about the contemporary world.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• Spiritual or alternative epistemologies (e.g., healing, divination, embodied knowledge)

• Convergences between spirituality and conspiracism

• Affective, moral and political dimensions of science skepticism and science appraisal

• Counter-disinformation industry, its moral economy and socio-cultural structures shaping it

• Conflicts over health, ecology, governance, and scientific, political and moral authority

• Alternative forms of evidence-making, world-building, and care

• Trust and suspicion in everyday politics

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