Feeling Is Believing: Rethinking the Role of Conspiracy Theory in the 2024 U.S. Election Cycle
Dear Members and Friends of the AmerikaHaus NRW,
Together with the North American Studies Program at the University of Bonn, the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, and the Deutsch-Kanadische Gesellschaft e.V. we cordially invite you to a lecture on:
Feeling is Believing: Rethinking the Role of Conspiracy Theory in the 2024 U.S. Election Cycle
Prof. Donovan O. Schaefer, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia
Monday, May 27, 2024 | 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
University of Bonn | Rabinstraße8 | room 2.025 | 53111 Bonn
Why has conspiracy theory risen to prominence in our current political moment–especially in the US, where presidential candidate Donald Trump has frequently affiliated himself with conspiracism? How is conspiracy theory deployed as a political tool?This talk proposes a new way of assessing the relationship between thinking and feeling, highlighting their deep interrelatedness and enabling us to see conspiracy theories as powerful political tools. This helps draw a clearer map of the role conspiracy theories are playing in the 2024 US election and devise more effective ways of responding to them.
Prof. Donovan O. Schaefer is an associate professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of, most recently, the award-winning Wild Experiment: Feeling Science and Secularism after Darwin (Duke UP, 2022). His research examines the multiple overlapping relationships between emotion and power.
This event is part of the Lecture Series "Current Issues in North American and Cultural Studies" of the North American Studies Program.
