Conspiracy theories

This dissertation examines social media-based conspiracy theories of the past five years (2016-2021) and considers what this recent conspiracy rhetoric suggests about the evolving relationship between people, platforms, and politics in the contemporary United States. I use the t…

This thesis studies the proliferation of conspiracy theories, specifically QAnon, to determine how the media environment, including various media channels, audiences, and messages, played a factor in the group’s growth. QAnon grew from a relatively obscure branch of the alt-righ…

In this dissertation, I argue for a pluralist Peircean epistemic approach to democratic justification to address the challenge of reasonable pluralism. Whereas public reason approaches to democratic justification require citizens privatize their worldviews, an epistemic approach…

The thesis examines Serbian conspiracy culture at the time of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in the spring of 1999. During the war, conspiratorial themes became a regular occurrence in Serbian mainstream media, as well as in pronouncements by the Serbian political establishment.…

The following critical appraisal presents eight interlinked works that apply and extend Michael Barkun’s (2003) concept of ‘improvisational millennialism’. This body of work demonstrates that, as Barkun suggests, the concept is widely applicable to the online communities in whic…