Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 by Clare Birchall and Peter Knight (review)

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• Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 by Clare Birchall and Peter Knight
• Asbjørn Dyrendal (bio)

conspiracy theories in the time of covid-19
Clare Birchall and Peter Knight
Routledge
https://www.routledge.com/Conspiracy-Theories-in-the-Time-of-Covid-19/Birchall-Knight/p/book/9781032324999
248 pages; Print, $32.95

The COVID-19 pandemic brought on a mass of conspiracist speculations. It also brought massive speculations about conspiracism and research on the same. Clare Birchall and Peter Knight's Conspiracy Theories in the Time of Covid-19 is a masterful analysis of all three strands. A slim volume at two hundred pages, it manages to be encompassing, careful, nuanced, and sharply analytical.

The book includes an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter, on the cultural and political contexts from which COVID conspiracy theories emerged, is follow by a chapter on the "infodemic." Chapters 3 and 4 trace various COVID conspiracy theories over the first year of the pandemic, and chapters 5–7 discuss the features of COVID conspiracy theories, conspiracy entrepreneurs, and what Birchall and Knight call "dis-info capitalism." This structure allows the authors, as they state, to "visit and re-visit Covid-19 conspiracy theories, covering new ground each time" using new perspectives, foci, methods, and contexts. The contexts also include history, as conspiracy speculations, even about COVID, did not start with Trump, his fans, or QAnon. Concerns involving causes of health and illness have long been sites of speculations about hidden evil actors. Allegations of conspiracy stretch from antisemitic rumors that plagues were caused by poisoned wells in the Middle Ages to modern miracle cures that the proverbial "they" allegedly do not want to release to the public. That a pandemic would release a mass of conspiracy narratives was thus easy to predict, and the World Health Organization was quick to warn about an "infodemic" following the pandemic.

The concept of an "infodemic" has a certain immediate appeal, but it is analytically problematic and is treated as such in the book. In public communication [End Page 18] it was often pragmatically understood as "fake news" and conspiracy theories, and as such served as a warning about misinformation. The "curb appeal" of the concept thus relates to the topic of the book—the conspiracy theories. There were undoubtedly enough of those, but Birchall and Knight show that they constituted only a small percentage of the misinformation content produced on COVID.

That conspiracist content was but a small part of the overall discussion is important, but the authors are never dismissive of conspiracist content or its potential effects. Instead, they carefully place every bit of information in contexts they then go on to analyze. Unlike most of the research on COVID conspiracy theories, the authors come from cultural studies rather than psychology, and thus the contexts are invariably social and cultural. Like other social phenomena, conspiracy beliefs or "narratives" must address real concerns and interests if they are to succeed in capturing the attention and imagination of multitudes. The authors devote a full chapter to the factors shaping our receptivity to conspiracist narratives, tracing elements from economic insecurity and inequality and resurgent ethnonationalism and authoritarianism to "post-truth" culture wars. If you want to get a brief, but deep introduction to the study of conspiracy theories, this first chapter of the book is one of the best you can get.

The pandemic unleashed an immense amount of research, both on COVID and on COVID-related conspiracy speculations. The book centers on the latter, but it also covers and draws on the relevant parts of the former. The research on COVID to which the authors refer tends to be opposed to conspiracy speculation, but when this research is presented it is not to debunk the latter but rather to contextualize the sometimes troubling information snippets and real-world events represented in conspiracy speculations. If the first chapter addresses important underlying factors of conspiracy beliefs that shape general levels and directions of mistrust, the research contexts on COVID and conspiracy claims presented—especially in chapters 2 and 3—address the more proximate concerns and arguments behind specific conspiracy allegations and what, and...