Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Are You with Us or Against Us?
Studying Conflicts Over Conspiracy Theories and Overcoming the Great Conspiratorial Divide
Ela Drazkiewicz
(Slovak Academy of Sciences)
The COVID-19 pandemic promoted simple dichotomies of laudable doctors supported by the trusting science citizens vis-à-vis an irrational mob endorsing dangerous theories. This paper examines methodological and ethical challenges of doing research with people separated by the conspiratorial divide.
Paper long abstract:
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, two contrasting images quickly became representative of the crisis. On the one hand, there were heroic doctors working day and night with the novel virus, risking their lives and making sacrifices to save others. On the other, there were ‘anti-maskers’ and ‘anti-vaxxers’: people doubting if the virus is real, questioning the effectiveness of protective measures, suspicious that the crisis is nothing more than an elaborate plot, a scam aimed to redesign their world and to destroy the values they hold dear. Reflecting on research conducted in Ireland with people separated by the conspiratorial divide, this paper examines some methodological and analytical challenges of doing simultaneous research with opposing stakeholders. Analysing my own entanglements in the conflicts over vaccines and conspiracy theories in this paper I argue that the pandemic was not just a battle to secure the acceptability of specific medical technology (the COVID-19 vaccine) but was also about safeguarding respectability of science and maintaining the rule of experts. It was about preventing ontological turn, the end of the era of reason, a dawn of modernity.