Transcript
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Sarah Marshall (0:25)
Welcome to your bonus episode, Sarah. I'm Sarah Marshall and this is the Devil youe Know. Today we're talking to Yvonne Eden, assistant professor at the University of Kentucky's School of Information Science, whose research focuses on knowledge production within fringe conspiratorial research cultures. These cultures include UFO followers and JFK assassination investigators, and for our purposes today, Taylor Swift and One Direction conspiracy theorists. This conversation with Yvonne Eden was a chance to look at conspiracy culture and what conspiracy theories and conspiracy culture can offer in a way that may actually be harmless or even constructive, especially to the lonely queer teenagers who are being isolated partly by the conspiracy theories about them. Things are getting a little bit heavy in our show and this conversation is beautiful and light and joyful and is talking about people in a fandom who are finding joy for themselves and building.
Interviewer / Host (1:31)
It for each other.
Sarah Marshall (1:32)
It is also worth noting that Yvonne and I had this conversation before Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce. But if there's one thing history has shown us, it's that conspiracy theories will somehow find a way to explain away even the information that would seem to disprove them. Hi Yvonne, nice to meet you.
Interviewer / Host (2:01)
I'm so excited to talk about the most important topic of our time. So you talk in this article about studying fringe conspiratorial research culture. And I mean, to start off just like, what is that? How do you define those terms and those terms working together?
Yvonne Eden (2:24)
Yeah, there are a lot of terms there, as you pointed to.
Interviewer / Host (2:27)
It's a beautiful term sandwich. Yeah.
Yvonne Eden (2:30)
And listen, in academia, we love a term, we love a term, we love a definition and we like to put them together. But I think the thing to start out with is what is a conspiracy? Even before we get into conspiracy theory or like what something being conspiratorial means. And so there's a definition that I like to use that comes from a philosopher, Matthew Dentith, and it basically says that a conspiracy has three elements. First element is a set of agents that are working together. So it can't be one person can't carry out a conspiracy. Second is secrecy. They have to be working towards keeping their activities out of the public eye. And third is that they have to have a goal so they have something that they're trying to accomplish. And so a conspiracy theory is, you know, any kind of speculation theory, evidence, statement that alleges that these activities are taking place, that these conditions are being met. So that means that anything from thinking that your significant other is planning a surprise party for you to thinking that there's one world government is a conspiracy theory. Right? It's a highly flexible definition. And so when it comes to gaylorism, you know, which is this theory that Taylor Swift is queer and closeted, a lot of people, when they hear me talk about it as a conspiracy theory, they say, like, okay, well, who are the conspirators? Like, it's just her, but it can't just be her, because in this theory, it alleges that she's had relationships with other people. And so the conspirators would be her PR team and her friends and family and people that she's dated. And then they're working to keep it secret. They're working to keep her in the closet. That's their goal. In terms of research cultures, what I think is really interesting about conspiratorial research cultures is, like, a lot of the time, people will talk about conspiracy theorists and conspiracy communities as though they don't have any concept of evidence or expertise or knowledge, that they just eschew those concepts altogether. But there's been research going on in the last 10 years that's showing that that's really not the case. They just sort of build these structures in an alternative way and in a kind of a separate, siloed way. Um, so Emma A. Jane and Chris Fleming call this, like, folk sociology. Alice Marwick has called it populist expertise. Right? When. When a conspiracy culture forms its own kind of expertise in like, a populist way that is defines itself against a mainstream perspective, mainstream consensus, the mainstream media, and that's also really instrumental to a conspiratorial culture, is there needs to be, like, a mainstream against which they define themselves and against which they're kind of developing and scaffolding their own mountains of evidence and knowledge cultures. Because a lot of the time, these conspiracy theories really hinge on kind of building repositories almost of evidence for the theory.
