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Curated Collections highlight previously published articles from the AnthroSource archives that speak to urgent issues in the present, offering insight into current events unfolding around the globe. From movements for racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty to the social implications of climate change, technological transformation, migration, and public health, these contributions demonstrate anthropology’s enduring relevance and responsibilities.
This collection brings together anthropological perspectives on conspiracies and misinformation in a time of rapidly shifting media landscapes and global uncertainty. These articles examine the social, cultural, and political contexts that allow conspiracy narratives to thrive, as well as the forms of skepticism, distrust, and alternative truth-making they embody. Together, they ask what anthropologists can contribute to understanding the power and persistence of conspiracies—and how these narratives illuminate broader struggles over credibility, expertise, and truth in contemporary societies.
What Happened to Social Facts?
By Karen Ho, Jillian R. Cavanaugh
Wild Eavesdropping: Observations on Surveillance, Conspiracy, and Truth in East Central Europe
By Jonathan L. Larson
How to Read a Case: Ethnographic Lawyering, Conspiracy, and the Origins of Al Qaeda
By Darryl Li
“Particles-to-People…Molecules-to-Man”: Creationist Poetics in Public Debates
By James S. Bielo
Chemtrails, Crisis, and Loss in an Interconnected World
By Alexandra Bakalaki
Belief Correlations with Parental Vaccine Hesitancy: Results from a National Survey
By Luke J. Matthews, Sarah A. Nowak, Courtney C. Gidengil, Christine Chen, Joseph M. Stubbersfield, Jamshid J. Tehrani, Andrew M. Parker
The Meme Radar: Locating Liberalism in Illiberal Hungary
By Annastiina Kallius, Rik Adriaans
COVID-19 and Evangelical Christianity: Growing Distrust and Faith Among White Rural Americans
By Johanna Bard Richlin, Anthony Reinemer
The WetNet: What the Oral Polio Vaccine Hypothesis Exposes about Globalized Interspecies Fluid Bonds
By S. Lochlann Jain
From Iatrogenesis to Vaccine Skepticism: US Mothers’ Negative Vaccine Perceptions and Non-Vaccination Practices as Reverberations of Medical Harm
By Johanna Bard Richlin