Welcome to the Conspiracy Theory Research Group!
Conspiracy theories have been a part of Western civilization for over a century, but in recent decades they have become an important element of cultural and political life and are beginning to influence our everyday lives.
While alternative media often produce or disseminate conspiracy theories, and mainstream media fight against them, our research group aims to study the formation and functioning of conspiracy theories in a value-neutral way as much as possible. We benefit from the fact that the members of the research team are (in addition to linguists, political scientists and other experts) religious scholars and anthropologists, and they take a similarly non-evaluative stance towards conspiracy theories as they do when studying various religions, folklore or folk ideas.
The religious-anthropological perspective is conspicuously absent from the public discourse on conspiracies. Yet its presence could reduce social tensions and enable an understanding of a phenomenon that, despite the opposition of authorities across the years, is rather intensifying.