Stef Aupers

• PhD
• Professor at KU Leuven

In a post-truth context where environmental claims of scientists and politicians are increasingly contested, this article explores how satirical climate fiction facilitates the imagination of and engagement with climate change. Taking Don’t Look Up (2021) as a case study, it presents a thematic analysis of 640 Reddit contributions. The analysis rev...

Due to growing public concerns regarding the consequences of disinformation and conspiracy theories, major tech companies have introduced policies to curtail them on their platforms. Until now, the academic debate has largely focused on whether these punitive policies are effective. In this study, we address the question of how de-platformed ‘consp...

Due to growing public concerns regarding the consequences of disinformation and conspiracy theories, major tech companies have introduced policies to curtail them on their platforms. Until now, the academic debate has largely focused on whether these punitive policies are effective. In this study, we address the question of how de-platformed ‘consp...

The popularization and normalization of conspiracy theories over the last decade are accompanied by concerns over conspiracy theories as irrational beliefs, on the one hand; and their advocates as radical and extremist believers on the other hand. Building on studies emphasizing that such accounts are one-sided at best, and pars pro toto stigmatiza...

The ubiquity of social media platforms fuels heated discussions about algorithms and selection biases leading people into online “echo chambers.” Scholars argue that social media deepen societal polarization and fuel political extremism. However, studies often focus on media effects, disregarding individual agency and (sub)cultural values that shap...

Conspiracy theories were once perceived as delusions of individuals on the fringes of society, but have become commonplace in mainstream culture. Today, they are produced, consumed, and circulated on various online media environments. From memes on 4chan, QAnon influencers on Instagram, to flat earth or antivaxx videos on YouTube, modern-day conspi...

Videogame companies are selling religion to an overwhelmingly secular demographic. Ubisoft, the biggest company in the world’s biggest cultural industry, created a best-selling franchise about a conflict over Biblical artefacts between Muslim Assassins and Christian Templars. Who decides to put religion into those games? How? And why? To find out,...

Digital media are normal. But this was not always true. For a long time, lay discourse, academic exhortations, pop culture narratives, and advocacy groups constructed new information and communications technologies as exceptional. Whether they were believed to be revolutionary, dangerous, rife with opportunity, or otherworldly, these tools and tech...

This chapter argues that the orthodoxies of modern science have always been challenged by intellectual counter elites and their ‘heterodox science,’ but that the Internet has provided a platform for the general public to participate. Its open, non-hierarchical structure affords the flowering of (once) stigmatized knowledge claims, invites users to...

This chapter presents findings from an ethnographic study of conspiracy theorists, vociferously present among today’s critics of science. Typically branded by scientists as dangerous, irrational, and deluded loonies, they do however not reject the scientific endeavor per se, but accuse modern universities, research institutes, and the scientists th...

Conspiracy theories are an integral part of contemporary societies, yet sociological research on the topic is still scarce. This is particularly problematic because conspiracy theories are not just theoretical ideas formulated in the abstract but are lived social and cultural phenomena that beg for more sociological analysis and explanation. In thi...

Whether we are talking about Alexa, chat bots or a videogame character, technological artefacts are increasingly being developed to mimic different aspects of being human. However, research on people’s experience with such technologies and the cultural imaginations of what makes them human remains underdeveloped. Guided by a reexamination of the so...

Although it is often assumed in the social sciences that ‘serious’ religion and ‘frivolous’ play are different, even incompatible, domains, this chapter deals with the elective affinity between both. On the one hand, role playing – particularly in online video games – allows individuals to informally experiment with religious identities, worldviews...

Despite their stigma, conspiracy theories are hugely popular today and have pervaded mainstream culture. Increasingly, such theories expanded into large master schemes of deceit where ‘everything is connected’. Moving beyond discussions of their truthfulness, we study in this article how such ‘super conspiracy theories’ are made plausible. We strat...

Players of videogames are talking about religion. Despite longstanding theories of Western religious decline, recent scholarship has assessed that religious traditions and narratives feature prominently in videogames. In order to answer how player communities in game culture deal with religion in games, this study analyzes online discussions (N = 1...

It is a mainstay in game studies that Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games are boasting social relations and community formation. Considering games as “sociotechnical” environments, this article studies how the usage of external communication technologies in an online video game guild shapes the members’ social dynamics. Based on a one-y...

In contemporary 'post-secular society', videogames like Assassin's Creed, BioShock Infinite or World of Warcraft are suffused with religious elements. Departing from a critique on studies perceiving such in-game representations as discriminatory forms of religious Othering, the main research question of this article is: how does role-playing the (n...

Conspiracy theories have become rather popular in the last decades: they are widely present in popular culture and many people in the West now follow conspiracy theories to make sense of what is going on in the world. But despite their popularity and normalization, the public image of conspiracy theorists remains morally tainted as paranoid and mil...

In the literature on religion in games, two broad types of religion have been depicted: on the one hand, historical religions—Christian, Muslim and Buddhist narratives, tropes and symbols—and, on the other hand, fiction-based religion, referring to fantasy, myth and popular culture. In this article we aim to describe, analyze and explain the emerge...

To arrive at an understanding of what drives the much debated spiritual turn in Western Europe, we study the spiritual trajectories and identifications of mindfulness practitioners in the formerly predominantly Roman Catholic context of Flanders in Belgium. Fifteen semi-structured interviews addressed their religious and spiritual biographical traj...

In this chapter, Stef Aupers, Julian Schaap, and Lars de Wildt argue that a “game-centered” orientation in the study of religion and video games (studying in-game religious narratives, discourses, and game rules) should be complemented with a “player-centered” perspective. They call for a focus on religious meaning-making in MMOs by using in-depth...

Despite their popularity and normalization, the public image of conspiracy theory remains morally tainted. Academics contribute by conceiving of conspiracy theorists as a coherent collective: internal variety is sacrificed for a clear external demarcation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands, we explore variation in the conspiracy...

How do religious nones deal with life, death, and suffering? When it comes to this kind of meaning-making, cultural sociology has fixated on either the waning significance of Christianity or the waxing significance of other forms of meaning making in the West, especially spirituality, leaving a blind spot for a systematic inquiry into the ways thos...

Hoe gaan areligieuzen om met leven, lijden en de dood? Als het gaat om dit soort zingevingsprocessen, heeft cultuursociologie zich gefixeerd op ofwel de tanende significantie van het Christendom, ofwel de toenemende significantie van andere vormen van betekenisgeving in het Westen, met name spiritualiteit, wat een blinde vlek suggereert voor system...

Based on a three-year ethnographic study of processes of identity construction in 15 Christian-Muslim couples in Italy, this paper focuses on religion and analyses how partners rely on various strategies in order to deal with religious differences within the context of family life. Does religious pluralism emerge as a problem actually perceived by...

Popular online computer games, like World of Warcraft, are full-fledged virtual worlds brimming with ancient religious narratives, mystical worldviews and magical powers. Nevertheless, they are rarely discussed in sociological debates about religion. Online gaming may temporarily invoke a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ but it can, given the fict...

Conspiracy theories are immensely popular today, yet in the social sciences they are often dismissed as "irrational," "bad science," or "religious belief." In this study, we take a cultural sociological approach and argue that this persistent disqualification is a form of "boundary work" that obscures rather than clarifies how and why conspiracy th...

It is a mainstay in the literature on consumer culture that the romantic, countercultural value of authenticity has become a core asset in mainstream marketing. Since there is little research on the particular ways in which commodities are endowed with auras of authenticity, this study analyses registers of authenticity in 153 beer commercials from...

While it is widely acknowledged that politics and politicians have fallen from grace among large parts of the public in western democracies, it is less clear what the latter’s political discontents are about. To find out, we performed an interpretative content analysis of the letters to the editor of the largest popular Dutch newspaper in the 2000s...

The Red Hat Society (RHS) is a relatively new and international women’s network that offers “fun” and “friendship” specifically for women over fifty. Its members, the Red Hatters, are easily recognized in the streets by their red hats and otherwise purple attire, giving the RHS its unique flavor of leisure combined with expressive public performanc...

Since its foundation in 1998 the ‘Red Hat Society’ (RHS) has become a popular international movement of women aged over 50 that is known for its distinct group performances. Red Hatters show up in public spaces wearing red hats, purple clothing and sometimes red gloves, and engage in various fun and frivolous activities. Previous studies about the...

This chapter discusses how the particularities of religious heritages, especially their understandings of the opportunities offered and constraints imposed by the Internet, matter in the new medium's religious appropriation. Catholic web designers face the dilemma of either creating the room for dialogue, debate, and diversity invited by the medium...

Inleiding 'Wetenschap is ook maar een mening', kopte NRC.Next op 14 September 2011 – een stelling die treffend samenvat hoe veel Nederlandse burgers tegenwoordig oordelen over wetenschappelijke kennis. Het typisch moderne onderscheid tussen objectieve kennis en morele waarden, feit en fictie, fantasie en werkelijkheid lijkt minder scherp dan voorhe...

Popular conspiracy theories, like those about JFK, the attacks of 9/11, the death of Princess Diana or the swine flu vaccination, are generally depicted in the social sciences as pathological, irrational and, essentially, anti-modern. In this contribution it is instead argued that conspiracy culture is a radical and generalized manifestation of dis...

It is often assessed that the construction of nature, technology and the relation between both is in the midst of a restructuring without specifying exactly what different articulations can be distinguished and how they differ from the modern notion of nature being separated from and domesticated by technology. Through an analysis of car commercial...

With the rise and widespread application of the internet, social scientists rapidly emphasized that some people were better able to gain control over these technologies than others. This so-called digital divide between the haves and the have-nots was seen as a new feature of contemporary inequality – as a reproduction or transformation of existing...

This article relies on in-depth qualitative interviews with 21 web designers, active in the fields of Catholicism, Protestantism and holistic spirituality in the Netherlands, to study religious appropriations of the Internet. The authors found that these different religious groups embraced the medium of the Internet motivated by a common desire to...

Klassieke sociologen als Max Weber hebben gewezen op het culturele onbehagen waartoe voortschrijdende processen van modernisering leiden. Dat onbehagen stond in de jaren zestig en zeventig van de vorige eeuw nog aan de basis van het romantische verzet tegen ‘het systeem’, maar is inmiddels toegeëigend door de cultuurindustrie. Romans, films en game...

In this article, the authors address the question of whether and how the appreciation of popular music consumers has globalized in the four decades since the mid-1960s. They use information from American, Dutch, French, and German popular music charts from 1965 through 2006. They find no corroboration for an overall trend toward an internationaliza...

Johan Huizinga’s claim that commercialization threatens the self-enclosed ‘magic circle’ of free play still permeates many contemporary games studies. Critiquing such generalizing and essentialistic assumptions, this article distinguishes four different ‘orders of commercialization’ that impinge on online game worlds and studies empirically how eac...

1. Introduction “After nearly three centuries of utterly failed prophesies and misrepresentations of both present and past, it seems time to carry the secularization doctrine to the graveyard of failed theories, and there to whisper ‘requiescat in pace’” (Stark 1999: 269). Stark’s words, published just before the turn of the century, may count on...

Paradoxes of Individualization addresses one of the most hotly debated issues in contemporary sociology: whether a process of individualization is liberating selves from society so as to make them the authors of their personal biographies. The book adopts a cultural-sociological approach that firmly rejects such a notion of individualization as naï...

Inleiding. In de week na 30 oktober 2010, de dag waarop Harry Mulisch op 83-jarige leeftijd overleed, kolkten de thema’s dood en onsterfelijkheid door de Nederlandse media. Meestal was de toonzetting serieus, maar soms ook luchtiger, zoals toen Jeroen Brouwers over Mulisch’ adagium ‘Ik ben onsterfelijk tot het tegendeel bewezen is’ opmerkte dat ‘j...

Er bestaat een opvallende overeenkomst tussen jonge new-agers, evangelicalen en moslims: kritiek op de in hun ogen ‘geperverteerde’ en ‘onechte’ religieuze tradities en instituties brengt hen tot een zoektocht naar de zuivere, authentieke kern van religie. Het anti-institutionalistische sentiment onder deze jongeren leidt hen dus niet tot een secul...

Most studies on New Age spirituality remain overly descriptive and lack solid, empirically grounded historical-sociological explanations for its increasing popularity since the counter culture of the 1960s and 1970s. The authors therefore study the motivations of the 'first generation' spiritual seekers to turn to the New Age on the basis of 42 qua...

Inleiding (tot themanummer) De roep om authenticiteit – om echtheid, puurheid, oorspronkelijkheid – is alom aanwezig in de westerse samenleving. Het grote draagvlak voor biologisch en ecologisch verantwoorde en daarmee natuurlijke voeding wijst daar op. Zo belooft een winkelketen als Marqt, net als vele andere bedrijven en producten, ‘Écht Eten’, o...

[Engelse samenvatting van Nederlandstalig artikel; summary in English of article in Dutch] An exploratory analysis of commercials and advertisements for foodstuffs and alcoholic beverages reveals an obsession with product authenticity in contemporary consumer culture. Rooted in the Romantic heritage and its upsurge in the countercultural 1960s, ar...

Analysis of International Social Survey Program (ISSP) data collected in 18 Western countries in 1998 demonstrates that Christian desires for a public role of religion are strongest in countries where Christian religiosity is numerically most marginal. Moreover, Dutch data covering the period 1970–1996 confirm that the decline of the number of Chri...

In dit artikel wordt onderzocht of twee centrale aspecten van secularisering hand in hand gaan: een afname van het aantal christenen en een toenemende privatisering van het christelijk geloof. Via een analyse van gegevens over achttien westerse landen en voor Nederland over de periode van 1970 tot 1996 laat dit artikel zien dat afnemende christelij...

A first aim of the present chapter is to provide evidence for the spread of spirituality during the last few decades by studying spiritual beliefs and self-designations among the general populations of Western countries. This chapter’s more important second aim is to refine Houtman and Mascini’s (2002) theory that the spread of spirituality is caus...

This essay describes the development of a spiritual phenomenon emerging in modern societies in a subaltern fashion, obscured by the public opposition between "religion" and "science". From Theosophy and Spiritualism in the 19th century it evolves into "New Age", to achieve a specific affinity with cultural digitization in the form of Cybergnosis.

In the modem, 'disenchanted world', magic and mystery have by large been banned to the world of fiction: the realm of literature, film and, more recently, online computer games. From a modem perspective, fantasy fiction may instigate a 'willing suspension of disbelief but it can never threaten the modem distinction between reality and fantasy, fact...

This article uses data from the World Values Survey to study the spread of post-Christian spirituality (“New Age”) in 14 Western countries (1981–2000, N = 61,352). It demonstrates that this type of spirituality, characterized by a sacralization of the self, has become more widespread during the period 1981–2000 in most of these countries. It has ad...

This article argues that New Age spirituality is substantially less unambiguously individualistic and more socially and publicly significant than today's sociological consensus acknowledges. Firstly, an uncontested doctrine of self-spirituality, characterised by sacralisation of the self and demonisation of social institutions, provides the spiritu...

"De Sociologische Gids is wereldbeschouwelijk noch methodisch-wetenschappelijk eenzijdig gebonden. Hij toetst slechts aan deze maatstaven: objectief binnen de grenzen van het mogelijke, wezenlijk belangrijk voor de sociale wetenschappen, verhelderend ten aanzien van de sociale realiteit." Met deze beknopte ‘beginselverklaring’ startte de toenmalige...

textabstractAnalysis of a dozen semi-structured interviews with Dutch New Age trainers demonstrates that the modern 'ethics of authenticity' underlies contemporary society's anti-institutional mood. All institutions, be they traditional or modern, or so our respondants argue, prevent one from being true to oneself. Institutional pressure for confor...

Analysis of a dozen semi-structured interviews with Dutch New Age trainers demonstrates that the modern 'ethics of authenticity' underlies contemporary society's anti-institutional mood. All institutions, be they traditional or modern, or so our respondants argue, prevent one from being true to oneself. Institutional pressure for conformity to soci...

Digitaal contact. Het net van de begrensde mogelijkheden. Speciale editie van Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, onder redactie van: Kuipers, G., de Kloet, J. en Kuik, S.

The classical assumption that scientific and technological progress are the main driving forces behind, what Weber called, the 'disenchantment of the western world', is basic knowledge in contemporary sociology. In this paper, however, it is argued that the implementation of digital technology also stimulates the religious, or more specific, animis...

In the social sciences, magic and technology are generally depicted as incompatible. Challenging this claim and, more specifically, the assumption that technological ex- perts are at the frontier of a progressive 'disenchantment of the world', this contri- bution presents a strategically selected case study of renowned programmers in Sil- icon Vall...

The ambition of the present paper is to theorise processes of re-enchantment in the modern western world by drawing on Max Weber’s and Emile Durkheim’s classical sociological insights on modernity, meaning and religion. Our aim in doing so is not only to demonstrate how much the latter have to offer to such an analysis, but especially to argue for...

In the last few decades the Internet has developed into an indispensable medium in the daily lives of most western people. Not surprisingly, also religious and spiritual groups use the Internet intensively to proclaim their beliefs and to get in contact with fellow believers. Yet, from the viewpoint of classical sociology, this is a very remarkable...

Thesis (doctoral)--Erasmus Universiteit Rotterdam, 2004.