QAnon Research: February 11, 2022
CfPs and Events and Publications, oh my!
Welcome
Thank you for joining the QAnon Research Network, we’re thrilled to have you here! Our aim is to send out a newsletter on the first Friday of every month (or every other month, depending on the amount of content) which brings together a variety of resources related to researching QAnon. Some of the things we hope to share with you are:
Journal publications
Events
Grant opportunities
Calls for papers
Book / chapter publications
Datasets
Project updates
Questions from the community
Syllabi
And more!
While we’ll search for relevant content, we’re also hoping that researchers will share their work and opportunities by submitting to our Google form. We also encourage people to comment on posts on the website and to always feel free to reach out to us. To grow the community, please invite anyone who might be interested by sending out a link to this newsletter.
Calls for Papers
Social Sciences Special Issue
Social Sciences is taking rolling submissions for its special issue “Loud, Proud, and Extreme: Understanding the Group Processes of Far-Right Groups.”
Manuscript submissions are due November 30th, 2022.
As per the website, “Perceived threats remain a principal driver sustaining far-right groups. Dynamics internal to far-right groups and external dynamics between far-right groups and/or rival groups (e.g., Antifa) remains understudied…This issue will examine the diverse nature of far-right groups, which include anti-government “militias” (e.g., Oath Keepers), accelerationists (e.g., Boogaloo Bois), neo-Nazi terror groups (e.g., Atomwaffen Division, The Base), alt-right gangs (e.g., Proud Boys), and sovereign citizen collectives, with the goal of better understanding the growing complexities of far-right to better inform public policy solutions. Given the dynamic nature of far-right groups today, this Special Issue encourages empirical research (quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods) with multi-/interdisciplinary perspectives from around the world that highlights cutting-edge approaches to examining far-right groups. Papers may be theoretical and/or empirical in nature. All submissions will be considered; however, primary consideration will be given to manuscripts that:
Investigate the relationship between online activity and real-world violence;
Examine the efficacy of deradicalization/desistance programs;
Engage in cross comparisons of far-right groups by either location or type;
Take innovative approaches to advancing our understanding of far-right violence.”
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology Special Issue
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology is accepting submissions for its special issue, “Engaging with Conspiracy Theories: Causes and Consequences.”
Manuscript submissions are due February 28th, 2022.
As per the website, “...Whilst this research has generated important knowledge on many of the concepts correlated with belief in conspiracy theories, experimental research on the topic is scarce. Key questions, therefore, remain about the antecedents and consequences of conspiracy theories, and experimental methods are better equipped to answer these questions. For example:
What are the causal antecedents of the belief in conspiracy theories?
What are the consequences—positive and negative—of being exposed to conspiracy theories?
Which psychological mechanisms underly the causes and consequences of the effects identified above?
What are situational factors preventing the negative effects of exposure to, or belief in, conspiracy theories?”
Events
The Eighteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society
Presentation Proposals are due March 15, 2022.
Conference Registration ends April 15, 2022.
As per the website, “We seek to build an epistemic community where we can make linkages across disciplinary, geographic, and cultural boundaries. As a Research Network we are defined by our scope and concerns and motivated to build strategies for action framed by our shared themes and tensions.
The Eighteenth International Conference on Technology, Knowledge, and Society features research addressing the following annual themes and special focus:
Special Focus: Trust, Surveillance, Democracy
Theme 1: Histories of Technology
Theme 2: Knowledge Makers
Theme 3: Social Realities”
Research Resources
Q Origins Project
The Q Origins Project tracks the origins of the conspiracy theory, capturing key figures, events, and ideas within the conspiracy theory in Twitter threads and on their website. Most importantly for researchers, their site is home to an archival database of QAnon threads on 4chan and 8chan, which are accessible here.
QResearch
Similar to the Q Origins Project’s database, qresearch is an archive of QAnon-generated content, but this site is maintained by QAnons. For those who remember qmap.pub, this is a continuation of those efforts by QAnons to track things like celebrity deaths and indictments. It is a very simple website that would be fairly easy to gather data from.
Publications
There are many QAnon papers being published at this time, so this section presents a brief selection of recently published papers.
“QAnon—Religious Roots, Religious Responses” in Critical Sociology [Link]
Sarah Louise MacMillen and Timothy Rush
Abstract: Conspiracy theories are not new to religion, nor an exclusively modern phenomenon. But they take on more destructive and wide-ranging impact with modern communication technologies. Looking at the root psychosocial mechanisms of conspiracy theories, we argue that they frame ideas, history, and culture through the cognitive mindscape of special, ‘hidden knowledge’. They also serve as a unifying theory of conflict and narration of history. The COVID epidemic has strained the economic and political system. Although it may be a matter of perception for Q-followers, a sense of precarity is enhanced by QAnon, thus unleashing and mustering an awakening for such extremist paranoid discourse of ressentiment. This parallels the cognitive mindscape of ‘the Great Replacement’. Prior to election 2020, QAnon’s base had been growing in Evangelical communities. Its presence continues to be felt.
“The Sinister Signs of QAnon: Interpretive Agency and Paranoid Truths in Alt-right Oracles” in Anthropology Today [Link]
Janet McIntosh
Abstract: QAnon's promotion of Donald Trump and conspiracy theories is well known, yet almost no analysis has focused on the cryptic writing style in Q's online postings, or ‘Q-drops’. This essay focuses on QAnon's relationship to signs and symbols, including the style of communication in Q-drops and the semiotic-interpretive stances that these encourage. The poetic forms in Q-drops have social effects crucial to QAnon's popularity. I examine the types of inquiry and semiotic ideology that Q's writing style encourages, and the epistemological roles this style allocates to followers. I also explore how Q-drops invoke the power of secrecy and divination to reify their aura of omniscience and discernment, while interpellating the Anon — a follower who interprets the Q-drops — as an epistemological agent in their own right. Ultimately, through decryption and suspicion, Q followers learn about the indirection of signs, and that the truth may lie somewhere behind the unreliable sign vehicle. This epistemology helps to explain some of QAnon's appeal and some of Trump's political durability.
“A Conspiracy of Data: QAnon, Social Media, and Information Visualization” in Social Media + Society [Link]
Matthew N. Hannah
Abstract: Seeing is believing, so goes the cliché. In our extremely online world, the particular nexus between visual information and political belief has become one of the thorniest challenges to truth. We live in an extremely visual world in which we navigate social media, search engines, platforms, interfaces, icons, memes, and smartphones. Despite the fact that we navigate visual information at an astounding rate, we have not nationally developed literacies to debunk bad information. I argue that we are witnessing a confluence between extremely online, crowd-sourced conspiracies, whose adherents possess a high capacity for online information gathering, and visualization, meant to communicate data about our world effectively and accurately through optical means which has been co-opted for information warfare. Deploying such informatics further legitimates bizarre, unhinged theories about political reality. QAnon, the extremely online conspiracy theory that has cast its shadow over the Internet, relies exclusively on information visualization to communicate its message and is symptomatic of our inability to combat misinformation that mimics the methods of data analysis and information literacy. I argue that QAnon’s success—indeed, its very existence—relies on (at least) two principal factors: (1) QAnon relies, intentionally or no, on a slippage between data and information that obscures the interventions by Q and Q’s anons in leveraging information warfare, and (2) QAnon supports such a slippage with complex and interactive visualizations of bad information, thereby accelerating apophenia, the tendency to see linkages between random events and data points.
Want to Submit to a Future Newsletter?
If you have any relevant publications, events, CfPs, datasets, or projects that you would like to promote through the QAnon Research Newsletter, please fill out our Google Form here.
