Duration: 1.7.2022 - 30.6.2026
Project: APVV-21-0394

Principal Investigator: Mgr. Dominik Zelinsky, PhD.

Scientific co-workers:
Mgr. Robert Klobucký, PhD.
Mgr. Marianna Mrva, PhD.

PhD students:
Mgr. Terezia Šabová
Mgr. Kamil Charvat

Simultaneous to COVID-19’s spread, seemingly similar conspiratorial ideas have appeared in various locations, among different groups. The pandemic fed old conspiracies and generated new theories regarding risk and illness, science, healthcare and the medical industry as well as state administration. As conspiracy theories have been flourishing the boundary between legitimate concerns, questions and critiques on the one side and conspiracy theories on the other started to blur. Conspiracy theories became a central issue not only to t hose people who endorse them but also to those who fear of their societal consequences. Soon conflicts over knowledge became a highly divisive force. By analysing how stakeholders on both sides of the conspiratorial divide (actors who propagate conspiracy theories and those who combat them) engage with medical conspiracy theories and attach a meaning to them, we want to understand what those conflicts can reveal about contemporary tensions of the Covid-19-driven world? Using case studies from Slovakia, Poland, Czechia and Hungary and the interpretive tools of social anthropology, supported by the data obtained through sociological and digital methods, the project will explore what are the particular characteristics of those conflicts in the Visegrad Countries? How do different national settings, socio-political arrangements and pandemic control strategies influence them? Further, the objective is to analyse what can conflicts over scientific knowledge and health governance tell us about the ways in which people make sense of the pandemic? What do they reveal about people’s vision of the post -Covid world, the future of their states and democracy at large?