Digital (religious) Language Practices in the Context of Conspiracy Theories

This project focuses on digital language practices and their religious references in the context of conspiracy theories.

The project addresses the following research questions from a linguistic perspective: How are conspiracy theories in digital contexts linguistically or multimodally linked to religion or religious practices and to what extent do they invoke extremist contexts? What emotions or impacts are expressed and to what extent do they reflect certain stances and language or media ideologies?

These questions are examined using a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods, based on a corpus of publicly accessible communications from social media, topic-focused forums and online comments. In a first step, corpus linguistic approaches are used for the collection and preliminary analysis of the data. The data collection is supplemented by ethnographic approaches in the form of surveys and interviews. In a second step, the data obtained in this way will be analyzed using discourse-analytical and qualitative-hermeneutic methods.