CONSPIRACY, RUMOR, ETHNOGRAPHY | 04/05

The rise of conspiracy theorizing in the United States has renewed interest into probing uncertain worlds. But, the US is only the latest edition to a longer history. Conspiracy, as the hyper-rationalization of the uncertain, is an ongoing process and project in colonial and postcolonial sites where imperial duress has created worlds of rumor, opacity, incalculability, and terror. In these worlds, traveling rumor, hearsay, suggestive stories, and conspiracy theorizing are part of the art of survival and sense-making. How do we conceptualize and study uncertain worlds ethnographically? What is the status of ethnographic evidence and how do we conduct fieldwork in sites imbued with opacity and uncertainty? 

Lisa Wedeen is Mary R. Morton Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. Her publications include three books: Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (1999); Peripheral Visions: Publics, Power, and Performance in Yemen (2008); and Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (2019). She is the recipient of the David Collier Mid-Career Achievement Award and an NSF fellowship. For Authoritarian Apprehensions, she received the American Political Science Association’s Charles Taylor Book Award (2020); the APSA’s inaugural Middle East and North Africa Politics Section’s best book award (2020); the IPSA award for Concept Analysis in Political Science (2021); and the Gordon J. Laing Award (2022). She is co-editor of Conspiracy/Theory (2023) with Joseph Masco. She is in the process of coediting an Oxford University Handbook, with Prathama Banerjee, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Sanjay Seth, tentatively entitled Reimagining Cosmopolitanism; and, with Aarjen Glas and Jessica Soedirgo, the interpretive methods part of an Oxford University Handbook on Methodological Pluralism in Political Science. Wedeen is also beginning work on a monograph on violence and temporality.

Ather Zia is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Northern Colorado. She is a political anthropologist, poet, short fiction writer, and columnist. Ather is the author of Resisting Disappearances: Military Occupation and Women’s Activism in Kashmir (2019) which won the 2020 Gloria Anzaldua Honorable Mention award, 2021 Public Anthropologist Award,  Advocate of the Year Award 2021 and 2021 Rosaldo Book Prize, Honorable Mention. She is the co-editor of Can You Hear Kashmiri Women Speak (2020), Resisting Occupation in Kashmir (2018) and A Desolation called Peace (2019). She has published a poetry collection “The Frame” (1999) and another collection is forthcoming. In 2013 Ather’s ethnographic poetry on Kashmir won an award from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology. She is the founder-editor of Kashmir Lit and is the co-founder of Critical Kashmir Studies Collective, an interdisciplinary network of scholars working on the Kashmir region.

Joseph P. Masco is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. Working at the intersection of science studies, environmental studies, media studies, and critical theory, his scholarship examines the material, affective, and conceptual force of technological revolution and its aftermaths. Masco codirects the Engineered Worlds research project, a collaboration with Tim Choy, Jake Kosek and Michelle Murphy to retheorize environmental conditions and research methodologies in light of planetary scale industrial aftermaths. He is the co-editor of Conspiracy/Theory (2023) with Lisa Wedeen, and the author of several books including The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (2006), a multi-sited ethnographic investigation into the long-term effects of the atomic bomb project in New Mexico and The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (2014), a multi-modal (ethnographic, historical, mass media) study of the transformation of the Cold War national security apparatus into a counterterror state after 2001.