Everything Is Connected: Conspiracy Theories in the Age of the Internet

Conspiracy theories are increasingly rife on the Internet. With their potential for spreading virally, they can reach large audiences across the globe. In their relentless drive to connect the dots into one overarching explanation, conspiracy theories seem to be made for the hyperlinked world of the Internet. Once marginal ideas now readily find an online community of believers. Although conspiracy theories encountered online are at times merely harmless entertainment or a sign of healthy scepticism, they can also lead to a loss of faith in scientific authorities and expert knowledge, to political disengagement, and even to violence. This research project addresses the question of how and why the Internet has changed conspiracy theories.

The team, based at Manchester University, King's College London, the University of Leuven University, and Amsterdam University will combine the 'close reading' techniques of cultural studies and ethnography with the 'distant reading' possibilities offered by big data methods to analyse the difference that the Internet has made to the production, aesthetics and consumption of conspiracy theories.

The main outcome of the project will be a definitive book that sets out the findings of the research as well as research papers by team members. In collaboration with the Institute of Education and the charity Sense About Science, we will develop workshops and materials (a) to train school teachers how to deal with the problem of conspiracy theories in the classroom, including creating educational materials for use with young people and (b) to help scientists and science communicators address conspiracy theories about, for example, climate change and vaccinations. Working with the think tank Demos, we will hold an end-of-project event and produce a report for stakeholders.

India and the Indian Ocean in the Early Decolonial Period: Archipelagic Imaginaries, 1950s-1970s

For the entire Indian Ocean region, the period between post-World War II decolonisation in the 1950s and the 1970s was characterised by vast political, cultural and economic changes. What do we know about Indian intellectual and literary cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean during this period? To answer this question, the EU-funded IATIO project will take the concept of ‘archipelagic imaginaries’ and apply an interdisciplinary methodology, combining tools and insights from history, literary criticism and cultural studies. It will draw from journals and the popular press, as well as works of fiction and selected case studies of material Indian Ocean sites of cosmopolitan encounters. The aim is to study the renewed investment in archipelagic theory and geocritical approaches.

The research shifts focus from teleological readings of Indian Ocean history and territorial perspective on postcolonial Indian culture, to a renewed investment in archipelagic theory and geocritical approaches. The temporal framework of the project ranges from around the time of the post-World War II decolonisation to the late 1970s, a period of far-reaching political, cultural and economic change for the entire Indian Ocean region. The project aims to advance a non-territorial epistemological framework for theorising postcolonial India through an investigation of the conceptual, imaginative and material Indian Ocean geographies inhabited by Indian intellectuals, writers and other cosmopolitan voices. It will do so by employing an interdisciplinary methodology that combines tools and insights from history, literary criticism and cultural studies, to engage in close reading of intellectual journals and the popular press, works of fiction, and selected case studies of material Indian Ocean sites of cosmopolitan encounters. The fellowship will be based at two leading academic institutions, King’s College London (UK) and the University of the Witwatersrand (ZA), and will create a substantial institutional link between KCL and Wits, with KCL emerging as a UK hub in the global academic Indian Ocean studies network.

The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth

The Sciences of Ageing and the Culture of Youth (SAACY) is a project funded by a UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellowship awarded to Dr Martina Zimmermann. It will offer a conceptual framework with which to overcome cultural pessimism about ageing and influence policy change.

Cultural pessimism about ageing endangers all facets of intergenerational solidarity; it shapes perceptions of the worth and value of human beings and directs decisions about care, research and funding priorities. SAACY will inform practices and policy development in these areas.

The research is driven by two questions: how does culture frame the questions and paradigms of leading researchers in ageing and diseases of old age? And how do scientific research developments act as cultural force; specifically, how do they influence societal approaches to dementia?

To address these questions, SAACY takes a multipronged approach that reaches across disciplines and sectors. An archive-based study will closely attend the dialogue between cultural discourses and scientific models of ageing. Sociological interventions will explore meanings and anticipations of ageing with our project partners from the third sector, and in collaboration with the King’s Policy Institute and older people SAACY aims to develop policy change for the ageing population.

The Shared Air

‘The Shared Air’ offers a history of how writers and scientists from 1640-1840 debated the political implications of air. Usually invisible and seemingly immaterial, air often goes unnoticed, yet when it is apprehended – as scent, freshness or pollution - air is recognised as a common resource and a symbol of freedom. In this symbol lies a nascent concept of a right to clean air.

Close readings across legal, philosophical, scientific and literary texts of the period reveal the inescapably shared nature of air, and so our fundamental interdependency with other humans, nonhumans and the environment. Coming at a moment of great public and scientific concern about air pollution and its pathologies – intensified by COVID-19 – The Shared Air will provide an essential historical framework for debates on air quality and the right to breathe.

Insights from this Enlightenment history will be invaluable for looming questions over the legal right to pollute and to be protected from pollution, and whether the air will remain a commons or whether it may become increasingly privatized. The research will be of interest to literary, cultural and intellectual historians. It will contribute to two major approaches to eighteenth-century and Romantic studies: the sensory turn, in highlighting the experience of air and smell; and the environmental humanities, in providing an original investigation of air rights and freedoms.

Underwater Lives: Humans, Species, Oceans

Underwater Lives is being funded as a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for Professor Clare Brant, 2022-2025. Climate crisis and human exploitation are changing the oceans at an alarming rate, damaging habitats and pushing species to extinction. In this urgency, there’s a rush of books about the oceans: my research contributes by exploring relations between humans, marine species and oceans over the last hundred years from a new perspective - underwater. When humans became able to stay underwater for more than a breath hold, what did they see and feel? How did they report back from this strange new realm?

Reading texts and images together, and sometimes against each other, life writing is used as a way of framing the changing relations between humans, other species and the oceans. What can we learn from an underwater world seen for the first time, with wonder and astonishment? How did the advent of cameras contribute to underwater life writings and the spread of oceanic knowledge? How do we ‘see’ the oceans through immersive texts?  How do contemporary underwater life writings engage with the destruction of the Anthropocene? How does underwater thinking engage with other species? Joining the growing domain of blue humanities, Underwater Lives brings literary, historical and aesthetic thinking to the oceans seen through human eyes - and their prosthetics, cameras.