The final (!) session at the AANZCA 2025 conference is on conspiracy theories, and starts with my great QUT colleague Kate FitzGerald, presenting her work on the conspiratorial canon. Her focus on the knowledge production processes of conspiracy theorists, and ‘conspiracy theory’ here means an effort to explain events or practices by references to the supposed machinations of powerful people who work to conceal their role. Most people in the Anglosphere have been found to believe in at least one conspiracy theory.
How do conspiracy theorists create knowledge, then? There is a link here to concepts such as participatory disinformation and populist expertise as they have been explored in the context of phenomena such as QAnon, for instance; such groups reject mainstream media accounts, expert knowledge, and scientific explanations, but these do not necessarily capture the industrious nature of the user practices that conspiratorial communities engage in.
There is a long history of the tropes shared by conspiracy theories; this extends back well beyond social media across the millennia, with conspiracy theories also circulating about the great fire of Rome in the ancient world. Today, such conspiratorial canon also resembles the ‘fanon’ that is prominent in contemporary fandoms, as groups select and review particular beliefs and incorporate this into their conspiratorial practices.
Such conspiratorial canon is a shared repository of knowledge that conspiracists refer to, created through collective labour and used to provide coherence to the interpretation of emerging events and incorporate them into existing worldviews. This enables them to maintain the conspiracist ideation, but also means that some new events and developments are discarded as not fitting with existing views. Conversely, developments that are integrated into the conspiratorial canon then also serve as a basis for the interpretation of future developments.
Conspiracy theories about the 2023 Maui wildfires being a psy-op by the Biden administration demonstrate this process; selective highlighting of information about the one house left standing, and targeted connection of such information with various other pre-existing conspiracy theories, occurred to develop a repository of ideas that could then be used to interpret further new information from within the worldview of the conspiracy theory. Kate will further explore these processes through interviews with users who have been engaged in conspiracist communities.
