1 Dec 2014 12:30pm - 2:00pm CRASSH Meeting Room

Description

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work in Progress Seminar Series.  All welcome but please email Michelle Maciejewska to book your place and to request readings.  A sandwich lunch and refreshments are provided.

Dr David Hickman

How can we reconcile the sense that recent conspiracy theories can appear – to put not too fine a point on it – crazy, and clear evidence that they have had a broad, if often transient, appeal?

Since 9/11, a succession of conspiracy theories have alleged that major incidents like the Aurora cinema shooting, the Sandy Hook massacre, the Boston marathon bombing and, of course, 9/11 itself, were actually ‘false-flag’ plots by secret government agencies – or some entity that might be called a ‘deep state’ – designed to pursue certain ideological objectives (the withdrawal of civil liberties, the repeal of the right to bear arms, the assertion of a supranational power). 

All of these theories have (to borrow a phrase) a ‘family resemblance’, and share two characteristics in particular: a recourse to scientific narrative as ‘proof’ of a conspiracy, and an appeal to some underlying ‘truth’ in photographic evidence.  And in both, there is the same uncoupling: scientific discourses can be deployed to undermine corrupt, ideologically distracted scientists; and photography is routinely capable of revealing hidden truths, even when the instruments of photography are controlled by a venal, manipulative mass media. 

However, such ideas (and suspicions) are not confined to conspiracy theories; they are commonly expressed, both in a perceived decline of scientific ‘expertise’, and in the tenets and accumulated assumptions of postwar photographic realism.  It may be that these ways of seeing, rather than the conspiracy theories themselves, present the most urgent democratic challenges.

About

Dr David Hickman is a Conspiracy and Democracy Visiting Fellow 2014-15

Dr David Hickman has worked as a cinematographer, writer, producer and director on  single documentaries and series for both UK and international television for twenty years.  David is based at York University in the Department of Theatre, Film and Television as Programme Director of the MA in Digital Film and Television Production as well as teaching on the BSc in Film and Television Production. He is a Visiting Fellow to the Conspiracy and Democracy research project for Michaelmas 2014 term.

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