From Pizzagate to Fiendish Pharma and the Deep State: Conspiracy Theories as Tribal Genre
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Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson (University of Pennsylvania) presented the inaugural lecture for the Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Speaker Series, hosted by the Department of Communication Studies.
The talk argued that conspiracy theories are bound together as a genre not only by a constellation of forms that recur in each but also by distinctive ways in which their adherents invest the theory with confirmatory evidence, protect it from falsification, and deploy it as a means of tribal identification. Drawing on the rhetoric of Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Jamieson explored the ways in which the conspiratorial genre shifts presumption and weaves post hoc ergo propter hoc inferences into evocative, unfalsifiable narratives that add purpose to the lives of those who embrace it.
Featured Speaker
Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication of the University of Pennsylvania, the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the university’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, and Program Director of the Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.
She has authored or co-authored 18 books, including Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President, published by Oxford University Press, which won the Association of American Publishers’ 2019 R.R. Hawkins Award. Her other award-winning books include Spiral of Cynicism (with Joseph Cappella) and The Obama Victory: How Media, Money and Message Shaped the 2008 Election (with Kate Kenski and Bruce Hardy).
She is a member of the American Philosophical Society and a Distinguished Scholar of the National Communication Association. She also is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and the International Communication Association.
For her contributions to the study of political communication, she received the American Political Science Association’s Murray Edelman Distinguished Career Award in 1995. In 2016, the American Philosophical Society awarded her its Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities. In 2020, the National Academy of Sciences announced that Jamieson was awarded its most prestigious award, the Public Welfare Medal, for her “non-partisan crusade to ensure the integrity of facts in public discourse and development of the science of scientific communication to promote public understanding of complex issues.”
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Speaker Series
This inaugural public lecture is sponsored by the Karlyn Kohrs Campbell Speaker Series of the Department of Communication Studies. The speaker series is made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Campbell, Emeriti Professor of Communication Studies, and expresses her lifetime commitment to social justice, rigorous scholarship, and robust intellectual exchange.