Jaron Harambam

Jaron Harambam (1983) works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, where he is part of the multi-disciplinary Fair News Project in which he studies the role of algorithms in news provision. He defended his PhD (cum laude, highest distinction) October 2017 at the Rotterdam Centre for Cultural Sociology at the Erasmus University Rotterdam, titled: “The Truth Is Out There” – Conspiracy Culture in an Age of Epistemic Instability. For this research project, he carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Dutch conspiracy milieu to study what contemporary conspiracy theories are about, who actually follows them and what these people do with these ideas in their everyday lives. The overall goal is to arrive at an empirically rich and theoretically elaborate understanding of the contemporary popularity of conspiracy theories. He has published about his research project in Cultural Sociology (2016) and in the Public Understanding of Science (2015). His broader sociological interests lie at the intersections of science, popular culture, (new) media and religion. Although most experienced with ethnographic research methods, he is knowledgeable of quantitative research as well. Before, he studied the commercialization of virtual game worlds, allegedly breaking down the “magic circle” of play which got published in the European Journal of Cultural Studies (2011). And he conducted both quantitative and qualitative research about governmental efforts to revive rural social life through new digital technologies which got published in Information, Communication, and Society (2013). He currently is an editor of the Dutch peer-reviewed journal Sociologie, and he co-edited a special issue on actor-network theory (2014), and is a founding member of the European network of scholars working on conspiracy theories, COST COMPACT.