Educational.

The Modules

The online training programme of the Project will be articulated into an Introductory Module and 5 teaching Modules. Each module will concentrate on a particular subject area that be based on our partners’ specific expertise:

Mod. 1 (Introduction). UniTo will develop the methods, and activities of community organising, the “Conspirology” game handbook and the “ConTrust” documentary guidelines. Applicant will have the duty of distributing all the teaching tools and educational resources required for the 5 Universities to carry out their modules;

Mod. 2 (COVID-19 and Disease). UAB will develop this Module examining the dynamics by which conspiracy theories propagated during the COVID-19 crisis, focusing on vaccine hesitancy and the dissemination of inaccurate and misleading information on new medical technologies;

Mod. 3 (Communication, Media and Technology). AAU will examine the communicative methods in the dissemination of conspiracy theories through online and offline channels with a focus on AI, so as to enable students to critically analyse the overwhelming amount of information;

Mod. 4 (Religion and Spirituality). UniTo will focus on analysing theories of conspirituality, a framework that exhibits cultural hybridity at the wider interaction between religion and conspiracy theories. This framework will facilitate the formulation of policy recommendations for the governance of health-related disinformation;

Mod. 5 (Politics). ITU will develop a European comparative framework that can articulate kinship among conspiracy theories that are geographically and culturally diverse;

Mod. 6 (Science). UT will focus on the relationships between environment, science, scientific communication, and conspiracy thinking, highlighting the best practices for identifying evidence based information and fake news.

Face-to-face workshops

Play the Conspiracy: The face-to-face workshops, lasting 25 hours, in each of the 5 partner universities involved in the Project proposes the activity “Play the Conspiracy”. In this activity, students will analyse together with the teachers the data collected during the 3 relational meetings with members of civic society (5 hours); these data, with other information collected online, contribute to the elaboration of the conspiracy narrative to carry out the first part of the role-playing game “Conspirology” (15 hours).

Replay the Conspiracy: during the mobility, students will carry out the second part of the “Conspirology” – following the same rules as the first part of the role-playing game –, with the aim of creating a new conspiracy theory that holds together the previous 5 conspiracy theories created in the face-to-face workshops. The ConTrust documentary will be made to recap the phases of the role-playing game.