"From anti-vaccine politics to aliens, this volume explores diverse critical approaches to conspiracy narratives that represents them as playful stories with serious ideologies and effects. It examines conspiracy in relation to social power and authority, moving beyond either disinformation or revelation. It looks at how the genre of conspiracy is the performance of questioning authority to produce new forms of expertise which frequently stabilize existing power hierarchies. Across three parts, the book theorizes how conspiracy narratives are told, what they do in the social world, and how they circulate these social meanings"-- Provided by publisher.