Workshop aims and rationale

• This one-day research workshop will explore new critical perspectives on conspiracy theory and mis/disinformation discourse. The ongoing boom in applied academic research to diagnose and debunk conspiracy theories and mis/disinformation is driven by understandable anxieties about the dangers such material can pose. Nevertheless, like ‘terrorism’ – as Critical Security Studies has shown – the label ‘conspiracy theory’ proves in practice to be disturbingly malleable and is now also routinely used to discredit dissenting or unpalatable opinion, contrary to the spirit of critical enquiry and in ways which threaten democratic values. Like ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’, the label ‘conspiracy theory’ positions designated opinions beyond the sphere of legitimate democratic debate, tagging them in readiness for digital destruction and marking their bearers for segregated exclusion.
• The epidemiological paradigm, which can frame not only mis/disinformation and conspiracy theory but also legitimate dissent, as an ‘infodemic’, may itself be a danger to democracy. By constructing human subjects as vulnerable vessels prone to ideological contagion, this paradigm involves a form of pastoral power whereby competent authorities are tasked with guiding the public to the ‘correct’ conclusions. The assumption is that given the 'correct' information, the 'correct' conclusions will be drawn. This workshop seeks to investigate how well-intentioned defence against falsehoods can inadvertently – or deliberately – be used to shrink the space for legitimate debate, discrediting dissenting or unpalatable opinions by positioning them beyond the pale of rational discussion.
• Drawing on insights from contemporary mimetic and memetic theory, philosophical accounts of biopolitics, radical democracy and technology, as well as critical analysis of pandemic and infodemic management, the wider history of political conspiracies and psychoanalytic and STS approaches, this workshop will consider the hypothesis that a technocratic utopia of complete information control is implicit in conspiracy theory and mis/disinformation discourse today.
• The workshop, organized by Dr Sinan Richards (French, UCC) on behalf of the Political Technologies cluster of CASiLaC, has been generously supported by UCC Futures - Collective Social Futures, the Department of French and the Department of Sociology and Criminology.
  

Programme

Friday 11^th September 2026, 9:30am – 4pm, CACSSS Seminar Room, O'Rahilly Building, UCC (in person only)

09:30 – 9:50 | Arrival, Registration, coffee

09:50 – 10:00 | Welcome

10:00 – 11:30 | Morning Session 1

• 10:00 – Patrick ffrench (French, KCL): “Regions of indiscernibility: conspiracy theory or delusional disorder?”
• 10:20 – Evelien Geerts (Philosophy & Women's Studies, UCC): “Re-examining the (post-) pandemic Conings Conspiracy Case: critical lessons for viral memetic philosophy”
• 10:40 – Cian O’Mahony (Applied Psychology, UCC): “‘Trust Us, We Know Best’: Designing a non-paternalistic approach to tackling problematic conspiracy ideation”
• 11:00 – Discussion

11:40 – 13:10  | Morning Session 2

• 11:40 – Oliver Davis (French, UCC): “The ‘totalitarian’ metapolitics of counter-conspiracy in neoliberal times”
• 12:00 – Órla Murphy (English & Digital Humanities, UCC): “Beyond cognitive immunity: Generative AI and the infrastructures of epistemic authority”
• 12:20 – Toby Green (History; Languages; Global Health Institute, KCL): “The inevitability of misinformation: conspiracism and anti-theory in a mediated age”
• 12:40 – Discussion

Lunch 13:10 – 14:00

14:00 – 15:00 | Afternoon Session

• 14:00 – Serene Richards (Law, NYU London): “Conspirare: an the art of breathing together”
• 14:20 – Kieran Keohane (Sociology & Criminology, UCC): “‘I want to believe!’ : Actually existing conspiracies of hyper-capitalism and the persistence of belief in a terrestrial lifeworld”
• 14:40 – Discussion

15:00 – 16:00 | Roundtable Discussion moderated by Adrian Favell (Radical Humanities Laboratory, UCC)

16:00 | Close

Paper outlines

Patrick ffrench (French, KCL), “Regions of Indiscernibility: Conspiracy Theory or Delusional Disorder?”

My paper will take as its starting point Michel Foucault's account, in the medical and legal discourses of emerging modernity, of a 'region of indiscernibility' between the legal judgement of a criminal act and the medical diagnosis of the 'moral fault' of an individual (Abnormal, lectures 1 & 2). A series of 'doublings' or superimpositions supported this indiscernibility, of act and person, judge and doctor, criminal and 'delinquent' or 'abnormal'. I propose that a contemporary indiscernibility of the same type is at play between the 'extreme belief' involved in conspiracy theories, and the 'delusional disorder' which is classified as a sub-species of schizophrenia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5, 2022). Forensic psychiatrists have pointed to the difficulty of differentiating between extreme belief and psychotic delusion, and to the paucity of the criteria proposed in the DSM, which include as pathological symptoms: rigidity in the face of contradictory evidence, and bizarre as opposed to 'nonbizarre' beliefs. The critical status of what counts as evidence, and the subjective and culturally determined nature of what counts as 'bizarre' further add to the indiscernibility at stake here, such that either critical conspiratorial thought which departs from the norm can be pathologised as delusional, or delusional racist/supremacist belief-systems can be socially sanctioned. 

Evelien Geerts (Philosophy and Women's Studies, UCC), “Re-examining the (Post-)pandemic Conings Conspiracy Case: Critical Lessons for Viral Memetic Philosophy”

This paper examines the (post-)pandemic Conings case, focusing on its viral memetic and conspiratorial origins as well as its politico-philosophical aftermath. Given shape by interdisciplinary perspectives from digital media studies, viral memetic philosophy, and critical terrorism and security studies, and that with excerpts from the anonymous Conspiracist Manifesto (2023) that critically unpacks the concept of ‘conspiracy’ and its now increasingly digital politics, this intervention starts with a sketch of the COVID-19 pandemic milieu that Belgian ex-soldier and now deceased ‘terrorist’, Jürgen Conings, operated in and against. Seemingly radicalized by the Belgian Flemish extreme and alt-right’s anti-establishment critique and memetic conspiratorial propaganda at the start of the pandemic (also see Geerts 2021), Conings ended up robbing an army base on the 17^th of May 2021 to then go underground with a plan to attack Belgium’s lead virologist, politicians, and a local mosque. Having been on the radar of Belgium’s Coordination Unit for Threat Analysis as a “potentially violent extremist” (OCAD 2021) since early 2021, Conings’ remains were found in a forest close to the German border mid-June 2021 after having shot himself. Conings’ disappearance, and later on, the discovery of his body, engendered pro-Conings sympathy movements and a wave of new conspiracies about his death and the Belgian federal state. In addition to spotlighting the memetic extreme and alt-right environments before and after Conings’ actions, which, as will be argued, play a major micropolitical role in the conspiratorial political scene-setting at the time, special attention will be paid to the dis/misinformation after the event and that in conjunction with potential critical theoretical lessons learned.

Cian O’Mahony (Applied Psychology, UCC), “‘Trust Us, We Know Best’: Designing a non-paternalistic approach to tackling problematic conspiracy ideation”

Conspiracy beliefs pose growing risks to both individuals and society. In response, behavioural researchers have increasingly focused on developing interventions to reduce problematic conspiracy beliefs. However, many of these approaches adopt strategies originally designed to combat other forms of misinformation, such as fake news, often assuming that debunking or factual correction alone is sufficient. These interventions, and the measures used to assess conspiracy ideation, are frequently grounded in implicit assumptions about what constitutes a reasonable belief and are heavily influenced by participants' cultural contexts. Moreover, many researchers adopt a paternalistic stance, positioning themselves as arbiters of truth and treating conspiracy theories as a priori false. I argue that, while conspiracy theories can certainly be harmful, the solution is not simply to encourage people to dismiss any narrative that appears conspiratorial. In some contexts, a healthy degree of scepticism and mistrust is both rational and necessary. I will present my mixed-methods research, which examines the value of measuring how people critically engage with a range of both plausible and implausible conspiracy theories, rather than focusing solely on belief endorsement. I will also discuss qualitative findings that explore how participants interpret and respond to psychological measures of conspiracy ideation, highlighting the assumptions embedded in these instruments and the challenges of assessing conspiracy beliefs. 

Oliver Davis (French, UCC), “The ‘totalitarian’ metapolitics of counter-conspiracy in neoliberal times”

As the intellectual historian Nicolas Guilhot (2022) has noted, liberal political theorists have tended to imagine conspiracy (theory) to be the sinister obverse of liberal democracy. Thus Hannah Arendt – building on Alexandre Koyré’s short essay on ‘the modern lie’, written in exile from exile, in New York, in 1943 – presented totalitarian movements as ‘conspiracies in broad daylight’ in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). For Arendt, Nazism began as a reaction against the fiction of a conspiracy of Jewish influence – as a counter-conspiracy, a metapolitical move implying the suspension of democratic norms – yet paradoxically came to model itself ‘more or less consciously’ on the example of the secret society in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this paper, I return to Arendt and Koyré, as well as to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue (1864), in light of Guilhot’s problematizing reading and reconsider Arendt’s account in the context of today’s increasingly securitarian neoliberal capitalist system. Is the ‘totalitarian’ force of counter-conspiracy being reinvented and redeployed by neoliberalism in its anxious discourse around conspiracy theory and disinformation? To what extent does ‘the epidemiological turn’, whereby dis/misinformation and conspiracy theory are dramatized in highly emotive terms as diseases of the demos, draw on an implicitly totalitarian political imaginary of parasitism and contagion? Finally, I discuss Guilhot’s provocative suggestion that anti-populism may be a defining super-conspiracy theory of (neo)liberal democracy and return to Jacques Rancière’s contentious view of conspiracy theory in his essay on the end of the first Trump presidency, ‘The Fools and the Wise’ (2021). 

Órla Murphy (English & Digital Humanities, UCC), “Beyond Cognitive Immunity: Generative AI and the Infrastructures of Epistemic Authority”

Public discussion of mis/disinformation frequently relies on an epidemiological vocabulary: falsehoods go “viral,” populations are “exposed,” platforms become “vectors,” and media literacy promises a form of cognitive “immunity.” Generative AI appears to intensify this crisis by enabling synthetic content to be produced and circulated at unprecedented scale. Yet treating AI-generated discourse primarily as an informational pathogen risks obscuring the infrastructures, institutions, and epistemic assumptions through which knowledge becomes authoritative in the first place. This paper brings critical AI studies and Digital Humanities into conversation with the epidemiological turn. It argues that generative AI is not simply a new vector for contaminated information. It is an epistemic infrastructure that reorganises the production, circulation, interpretation, and perceived authority of knowledge. Large-scale models transform cultural archives into computational data, detach texts and images from their provenance, and generate an appearance of cultural fluency without memory, context, or responsibility. The central problem is therefore not only whether an output is true or false, but how AI systems reshape the conditions under which claims become visible, credible, and actionable. Digital Humanities offers a particularly useful “criticality from within”: an approach combining technical understanding with historically, culturally, and institutionally situated interpretation. Its work on cultural analytics, archives, representation, and scale can reveal what computational systems amplify, flatten, exclude, or render illegible. Its pedagogical commitments also extend the analysis. If generative systems substitute fluent output for the difficult labour of interpretation, the deeper risk may be a weakening of metacognition: our capacity to examine how we know, why we trust, and how judgments are formed. Rather than seeking only to inoculate individuals against harmful content, this calls for deeper, critical scrutiny of the technical and institutional environments that manufacture synthetic fluency and organise epistemic authority.

Toby Green (History, Languages and KCL Global Health Institute, KCL), "The Inevitability of Misinformation: Conspiracism and Anti-Theory in a Mediated Age"

In La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas eu lieu Jean Baudrillard suggested that anything reduced to a point of information is "a site of endless speculation". This paper takes this as a starting point. Looking at the information era and the relationship between quantum theory, statistical modelling and modern governance through the lens of the work of Paul Virilio, Giorgio Agamben, and the novelist Vasily Grossman, it suggests that the framework of data-driven policy and society produces speculation about information as an inevitable byproduct. The war on misinformation is therefore a rhetorical distraction from materialised inequities as they expand in the era of the internet data monopolists.

Serene Richards (Law, NYU London), “Conspirare: On the Art of Breathing Together”

TBC

Kieran Keohane (Sociology & Criminology, UCC), “‘I want to believe!’ : Actually existing conspiracies of hyper-capitalism and the persistence of belief in a terrestrial lifeworld”

The anthropologically deep-seated primordial economy of fear and desire is that as human beings we want to believe in the existence of ‘something’ greater than our mere individuality - otherwise we are exposed to the Real / Lack / Void: we  fear the abyss, and so we desire for there to be ’something’ rather than ’Nothing’. This is the basis of all myth, religion, civilizations and legitimising ideologies. It has always been there, but it is hugely amplified and attenuated in late modernity, evidenced by our culture of pervasive nihilism on the one hand and proliferating conspiracies on the other. Conspiracy - con-spire to be a collective social body animated by the one spirit, a spirit that spreads mimitecially and contagiously- and is characterised by propensity to violence and scapegoating… (so characteristic of recent and current conspiracies Q Anon, Pizzagate, Antifa… and how the deliberate propagation of such conspiracies are used to mask and to fog ‘actually existing' conspiracies - (amongst the oldest tricks in the book of spy-craft, the ‘great game’ of deception and psych-ops…   that the proliferation of a tissue of small lies hides bigger lies (e.g. the Project for a New American Century's ‘war on terror’ after 9/11 and its subsequent reiteration as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2026 whereby the machinations of the 'deep-state’ becomes projected and deflected onto the 'mundane state’ and targeted for demolition by Russel Voigt, Musk and DOGE to make way for the new order of hyper capitalism, techno-fascism and the divine Market. This conspiracy has real ‘cells’ that are 'hiding in plain sight’ -the Mont Pelerin Society -von Hayek, Friedman, Buchanan, Nozak — four horsemen of the neoliberal apocalypse,  and the proliferation of ’think tanks’, lobbyists and policy advisory groups that have thoroughly infiltrated universities, states and governments -narrative capture, policy capture, state capture, bloc capture… the conspiracy that is ’total capitalism’. So, there is a real, actually existing conspiracy, the pact of billionaire totalitarian techno-feudalists -building a regime of truth, of post-humanist bio-power, and its cosmological fantasies of a singularity of artificial intelligence and extra-terrestrial existence,  a future extra-terrestrial form of life to which, to re-issue Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution's battle cry for the war for the soul ’There Is No Alternative’ and the existence of terrestrial ’society’ is denied and erased in the name of the divine Market: "There is no such thing as society!" In this post-post-social future human life is alienated  -people are variously ‘aliens’ -surplus, undesirable, to be expunged, excremental, to be left behind, a social hygiene problem to be managed by Palintir, ICE and fire. But against End-Times fascism I want to believe, in terrestrial life: that there is a secret society operating beneath and within the   I’m going to call that secret society ’society’ itself, more specifically the taken-for-granted, invisible, omnipresent sui-generis underground conspiracy that is the social ‘lifeworld.’ Just as the new order outlined in Plato’s Republic ultimately relied on a ’noble lie’ the world order envisaged by end-times techno fascists relies on the authority of Rene Girard as the so-called 'Charles Darwin of the Humanities’ for an (ig)noble lie to indict human life as animated by envy, rivalry with a fatal propensity to violence to legitimate a post-humanist ideology. But contagious violence is only one dimension of mimesis (all be it the one emphasised in Girard’s theory) but the other equal & opposite mimetic tendency is desire for communication and understanding, the desire and the mimetic tendency towards homonia - how people become like-minded… (rather than envious, rivalrous and conflicted) how we come to share a common language, norms, values and ideas, our mimetic desire to belong to a shared social lifeworld. The lifework is ‘colonized’ by system logics of money and technocratic power (Habermas), but still it persists, and I will try to show the persistence of the lifeworld from the Tower of Babel to the present…