CartConspiracy Theory as Method:
Speculation and the Infrastructure of Belief Instructor: Joseph C. RussoProgram: WorkshopDate: July 12, 19, 26, August 2ndTime: 14:00-16:30 ET
DESCRIPTION: This Workshop invites participants to treat conspiracy theory not simply as pathology or misinformation, but as a mode of world-making: a method of connecting fragments, sensing hidden structures, and producing meaning amidst chaos. Drawing on anthropological, philosophical, and artistic perspectives, we will approach conspiracy theory as both a cultural phenomenon and an epistemic practice that attempts to render the invisible visible.
Across four sessions, participants will examine key theoretical and ethnographic approaches to conspiracy theory: from Cold War anthropology and psychoanalytic accounts of projection to contemporary digital subcultures and the aesthetics of evidence. Each week will pair a short reading or media artifact with a practical task: tracing a historical or contemporary conspiracy narrative, mapping its affective economies, or producing a short speculation (text, image, sound) that reflects how conspiracy theories form.
Rather than debunk or defend conspiracy theories, we will analyze how they organize perception and belonging, how they intersect with gender, race, and power, and how they mirror methods of anthropological critique itself. The final meeting will center on participants’ creative or analytical projects (mini-essays, field notebooks, zines, or experimental presentations), each exploring how conspiracy theory serves as a diagnostic lens for the present.
This Workshop will appeal to artists, theorists, and researchers interested in ethnography, critical media, and speculative inquiry. It builds on emerging conversations that treat conspiracy not as irrational deviation, but as a mirror to reason, a sensory form that reveals as much about our infrastructures of belief as about the imaginary of hidden worlds.
Session 1: The Conspiratorial Turn, Reading the Hidden / Core readings: Susan Lepselter, The Resonance of Unseen Things (Chs. 1–2); Kathleen Stewart, “Ordinary Affects” (selections); Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?”
Focus: Conspiracy as ethnographic object and affective atmosphere. Field exercise: write “fieldnotes of suspicion” from daily life or digital encounters.
Session 2: Infrastructures of Belief / Core readings: Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the False”; Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism (Ch. 7: “Reflexive Impotence”); Jean and John Comaroff, “Occult Economies.”
Focus: The political economy of belief and the circulation of hidden knowledge. Task: map one conspiratorial infrastructure (media, algorithmic, social).
Session 3: Intimacy, Gender, and the Body of Proof / Core readings: Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Paranoia); Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid and Reparative Reading”; Joseph Russo, “Hiding in Plain Sight: QAnon and its Seekers.”
Focus: Conspiracy as moral drama and embodied knowledge. Task: produce a short audio or visual vignette on the gendered life of suspicion.
Session 4: Speculative Ethnography and Counter-Conspiracy / Core readings: David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being”; Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings.”
Focus: Turning conspiracy into method. Participants share final projects (essays, zines, installations, or speculative field notebooks), exploring conspiracy as critique, poetics, or world-building.
IMAGE: Jonathan Martin Londons Overthrow, Circa 1839
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