‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Jones, Laura

doi:10.1007/s10708-008-9252-7

Cited by 15 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…These events are often referred to as "False Flags." A False Flag is typically an event that occurs covertly (in this case, the Boston Bombing secretly being a US military operation) that allows for another event to occur (Jones, 2010). Anonymous believes that the act of blaming a domestic act on a foreign national can direct attention away from crucial, controversial legislature, like CISPA.…”

Section: Anonymous: Sentiment Change Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Crowdsourcing Investigations

Tapia

LaLone

2014

International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management

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In this paper the authors illustrate the ethical dilemmas that arise when large public investigations in a crisis are crowdsourced. The authors focus the variations in public opinion concerning the actions of two online groups during the immediate aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing. These groups collected and organized relief for victims, collected photos and videos taken of the bombing scene and created online mechanisms for the sharing and analysis of images collected online. They also used their large numbers and the affordances of the Internet to produce an answer to the question, “who was the perpetrator, and what kind of bomb was used?” The authors view their actions through public opinion, through sampling Twitter and applying a sentiment analysis to this data. They use this tool to pinpoint moments during the crisis investigation when the public became either more positively or negatively inclined toward the actions of the online publics. The authors use this as a surrogate, or proxy, for social approval or disapproval of their actions, which exposes large swings in public emotion as ethical lines are crossed by online publics.

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Section: Anonymous: Sentiment Change Over Timementioning

confidence: 99%

Crowdsourcing Investigations

Tapia

LaLone

2014

International Journal of Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management

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“…For example, in my own research I participated in weekly protests staged by members of the 9 ⁄ 11 Truth Movement at Ground Zero in Manhattan. Through both their corporeal presence at the site and the text, images and symbols displayed on posters and flyers reinforcing the claim that '9 ⁄ 11 was an inside job', these protestors presented passing members of the public with an alternative account of history, memory and political accountability to that officially memorialised at the site; eliciting a diversity of emotional responses (see Jones 2010).…”

Section: Making Space For a Commonplace Geopoliticsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Commonplace Geopolitics of Conspiracy

Jones¹

2012

Geography Compass

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Conspiracy narratives and ways of knowing are a highly visible, accessible and increasingly commonplace part of contemporary global life, permeating across spheres of politics, science and popular culture. Catalyzed by rapid developments in networked media and a political climate of enhanced government secrecy following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, thinking conspiratorially about power forms part of a broader global public challenge to State control over access to information and knowledge. Rather than relegate the study of conspiracy to a marginalised and discredited form of dissent (‘conspiracy theory’), this article proposes how geographers can bring a critical attention to the multiple spatialities inherent in and produced through discourses of conspiracy; the ways of knowing and practising the world which conspiracy informs for differently placed subjects, both publics and politicians alike, across the political spectrum. This discursive understanding of conspiracy is developed in relation to the critical geopolitics scholarship and recent concerns within this literature towards producing more situated, embodied and emotional accounts of geopolitics stemming from engagements with non‐representational and feminist theory. Grounding the geopolitical analysis of conspiracy discourse in these concerns, the types of geographies that might emerge is explored through empirical research conducted on and with the 9/11 Truth Movement. Here the convergence of heterogeneous political actors around their conviction in a US government conspiracy exposes some of the possibilities and problematics which attending to the commonplace geopolitics of conspiracy opens up for ongoing research.

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“…Yet, as the massive literature on nationalism and belonging clearly demonstrates, even as emotions are at the heart of the matter, they are oftentimes not the ones that create communities, but instead are those intended to dismantle them (see Gruszczynska, 2009). Hatred, in fact, seems to be one of the most common emotions expressed in relation to nation and belonging, and the feminist-inflected literature that studies such expressions illustrates how debates over the nation are debates over the bodies that ground national subjectivities in particular peoples located in particular places (Jones, 2009). Implicit within this growing literature on emotions and social justice is that attention given to the politics of hatred could provide some clues to creating broad-based coalitions for fighting against the production of hate-able subjects who are then targets of racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and so forth.…”

Section: Emotional Citizenshipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice

Wright

2010

Progress in Human Geography

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The recent emphasis on emotional geographies has turned critical attention to the connections linking affect and social justice. It is hard to imagine this ‘emotional turn’ in the field without much of the ground having been laid by feminist challenges to epistemology, objectivity, rationality, to the gendering of knowledge and the conceptualization of human embodiment, psychic life, subjectivity, and political agency, all in relation to power so often substantiated around a belief that the public and the private are discrete and oppositional domains necessary for organizing social, economic, and political life. In this report, I address the following questions. How can feminist and emotional geography tighten their connections, fuel their shared passions and generate a synergy of scholarship oriented toward activism and progressive change? How can geographies of feeling broaden the path for justice that feminism endeavors to plow? In doing so, I continue my emphasis on research that grounds theoretical discussion with research conducted in activist projects conducted in the name of social justice. I do so as a matter of my own emotional investments — I firmly believe that scholarship must engage with the ways in which people beyond the academy wrestle with the concepts in their daily lives that scholars contemplate, sharpen, and circulate through academic production. So the debates that we scholars so often have with ourselves over the finer points of theory reveal, in my view, their greater significance when they provide tools useful for people who seek to create kinder and more compassionate worlds. Thus, I highlight the scholarship that creates toolkits out of feminist scholarship, emotional geographies, and research on social justice.

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‘How do the American people know…?’: embodying post-9/11 conspiracy discourse

Cited by 15 publications

References 33 publications

Crowdsourcing Investigations

Crowdsourcing Investigations

The Commonplace Geopolitics of Conspiracy

Geography and gender: Feminism and a feeling of justice

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