The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities present:

Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media

Panel 4

Tuesday, April 20, 2021  2:00pm

featuring Michael Butte and Marc-André Argentino, moderated by Camille Robcis

“Apocalypse Pending: Religion, Politics, and Social Media” explores the growing popularity of conspiracy thinking in our current moment and its place in the history of religious movements, particularly in the US context.  It considers how new media technologies have made it possible for the dissemination of such thinking on a scale unimaginable in the past, how the moral panic it generates is impacting social and political life worldwide, and whether there are measures available to control its spread or mitigate its effects.

This fourth panel in the series will focus on QAnon and the popularity of conspiracy thinking outside the US, particularly in Europe.

Sponsored by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, The Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, The Brown Institute for Media Innovation, Committee on Global Thought, Columbia Global Centers, and the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. 

Owing to limited capacity for this event, we will be sending registration confirmation and a Zoom webinar access link the day before the event. If you do not receive the access link, that means we were not able to accommodate you for this event, but we will notify you should the recording later become available online.

Michael Butter is Professor of American Studies at the University of Tübingen in Germany. He is the autor of The Nature of Conspiracy Theories (Polity, 2020) and co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (Routledge, 2020). He is also the Principal Investigator of the project "Populism and Conspiracy", which is funded by a grant from the European Research Council.

Marc-André Argentino is a PhD candidate in the Individualized Program (INDI) at Concordia University. His research examines how extremist groups leverage technology to create propaganda, recruit members to ideological causes, inspire acts of violence and impact democratic institutions. He has an MA from Université Laval and a BA from Concordia.

Moderator: Camille Robcis is Associate Professor of French and History at Columbia University. She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history. She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France and Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France.