Connecting the Dots

For some time now, both the political public and the social sciences have been experiencing increasing mistrust of key social institutions such as politics, the media, and science. The debate, which often revolves around the labels `conspiracy theories` and `alternative facts`, has so far mainly focused on the question of the socio-demographic distribution of these attitudes in the population and, in particular, their potentially negative effects on democratic decision-making and negotiation processes as well as society as a whole. However, little consideration has been given to the question of how these attitudes and corresponding theories arise in the first place, i.e. how people collectively develop and share this suspicious view, rather than simply asking why so-called conspiracy theories are passively adopted and represented. The interdisciplinary research project "Connecting the Dots: Reconstructing the Social Production of Suspicious Knowledge" takes this research gap as an opportunity, firstly, to reconstruct how `suspicious knowledge emerges and, secondly, to show that it can be understood as a specific variety of social criticism. The assumption is that, among other things, so-called conspiracy theories are used to criticize the way society is set up and functions in a socially non-legitimate way, and that this core of criticism can and should be worked out. The project is based on an innovative mixed-methods approach in order to do justice to the phenomenon in its various facets and to investigate the process of the emergence of `suspicious knowledge` at different levels (of actors, milieus, communication, etc.). In addition to a representative online survey, group discussions, ethnographic observations and biographical-narrative interviews are collected and analyzed using different interpretation methods. The project collects and analyzes data from three German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria and Switzerland) and compares them with each other. The purpose of this approach is to identify common, transnational structures as well as any national differences. This innovative research project, which focuses on different data sources and evaluation methods as well as on national comparison, is intended to help better understand how `suspicious knowledge` is generated and why social criticism manifests itself in this particular form. .