Jan Hensellek

Digital Conspiracy Discourses as Spaces of Dissension 

Conspiracy theories contest widely accepted knowledge claims about the world and our social reality by postulating perceived contradictions and ambiguities in official narratives and (re-)contextualizing them against the background of a conspiracy narrative. Conspiracy theorizing as a social practice thus includes both practices of navigating contradictions and practices of contradicting. Especially in online spaces, discourses around conspiracy theories over the past decades have increasingly moved out from the societal fringes and into the broader context of large internet forums and content-sharing websites. Unlike in the isolated context of politically extreme chat groups, public conspiracy discourses often include a more heterogeneous mix of users championing various incompatible theories or divergent readings of the same theory. Linguistic research on how users disagree about and debate conspiracy theories can provide valuable insight into how populist, racist, and antisemitic positions often come to dominate these discourses despite their initial heterogeneity.

My dissertation project approaches this question from a discourse-linguistic perspective through a corpus-based mixed-methods study of online comments and forum posts about conspiracy theories on YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and 4chan. The project characterizes conspiracy theorizing as a collection of epistemically situated practices for discursively negotiating alternative orders of knowledge against the background of a conspiracy narrative. The project focuses on the communicative practices of dissension and linguistic positioning, through which conspiracy theorizing is performed in public, digital spaces. To what extent can the discussions that take place in these spaces be understood in terms of agonal discourse with Mattfeldt or Felder? What role do more aggressive forms of dissension play? How do users utilize affective, epistemic, and evidential stancetaking to position themselves and others toward the knowledge claims that are posited in these conspiracy discourses? These are the questions that I am seeking to answer through my dissertation project. By comparing linguistic practices between different platforms and communities, I also seek to gain insight into how the different comment cultures and varying technical affordances of websites influence how users voice disagreements about conspiracy theories.