Credit: Nick Romanenko

Assistant Professor Jack Bratich was a proofreader of United States Tax Code before he decided to pursue his Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "I quickly decided I needed to get back into the academy," he said. His graduate studies in philosophy at Binghamton University provided the Foucauldian foundation for much of his research and his book "Conspiracy Panics."

Jack Bratich was a doctoral student at the University of Illinois in December 1994 when he flicked on the television and witnessed a bizarre juxtaposition.

John Mack, a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard Medical School who died in 2004, was on The Oprah Winfrey Show discussing his research into stories of alien abduction experiences.

“Here you have an elite academic trying to explore this subcultural phenomenon, and his outlet of expression is one of the biggest popular cultural shows,” said Bratich, an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies. “I thought, ‘Something is going on here that needs to be looked at.’”

Less than half a year later, Bratich’s studies into the cultural phenomenon of conspiracy theories took a darker turn when the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 spawned a wave of paranoia concerning government, politics, and deadly forces. “Until then, [conspiracy theories] were a relatively harmless, entertaining, and marginal set of knowledges,” Bratich said. “Now, it became dangerous. … At that point, everything changed for me, too, in terms of how I was going to study this.”

Bratich’s dissertation work was the seedling for his book, Conspiracy Panics: Political Rationality and Popular Culture (State University of New York Press, 2008). In it, he examines the discourse and anxieties surrounding conspiracy theories, not the theories themselves. Conspiracy Panics examines how conspiracy theories form, why they proliferate, and who tries to stamp them out.

A cultural studies scholar who takes a critical look at popular culture (one of his recent areas of study is reality television), Bratich says that recent conspiracy theories are born out of the investigative vacuum created by institutional failure and filled by grassroots access to technology.

“A lot of my undergrads really light up when I start talking about secret societies," Bratich said. "They are feeling the alienation and skepticism that young people have had for many generations, and now it’s taking this other shape, too, through social network media.”

Indeed, ideas surrounding conspiracy theories have invaded the consciousness of millions, especially young people, through the popularization of alternative media websites and particularly through video embedding and sharing. The documentary Loose Change, which promulgates the notion that the U.S. government was involved in the 9/11 attacks, spread like wildfire across the internet and prompted an equally well-known debunking by Popular Mechanics magazine.

That a failed film school student from upstate New York and a magazine dedicated to automotive technology and used cars engaged in a debate about what happened that day points to a larger failing by government commissions and the mainstream media to answer the public’s many questions about the tragedy.

“Where are the investigative bodies that we can turn to to trust and do these investigations and research?” Bratich asks. “Investigative journalism has been gutted over the last 15 or 20 years. Government-appointed bodies ... their work is not just full of holes but has all these closed door meetings.

“Now we are faced with how to reorient ourselves around this new version of investigative research,” he says.

When he arrived at Rutgers from the University of New Hampshire in 2003, Bratich settled in Princeton. “I was accustomed to college towns,” he said. But a year later he decided to move to New York’s Lower East Side, just across the lower tip of Manhattan from Ground Zero.

“That actually changed a lot of my work, moving to New York City,” Bratich said. The last chapter, which deals with the 9/11 attacks, came from Bratich’s experience at 9/11 truth movement meetings taking place in lower Manhattan. “I wanted to see how they were trying to organize politically. Being on the Lower East Side plugged me into a set of activists and activist organizations, which made me think about how to analyze the truth movement in as far as how it links up to the left.”

Conspiracy theories are neither exclusive to the left nor right side of the political opinion spectrum. Instead, certain types of skepticism have become attached to extremism of either wing, rendering the askers of questions marginal. In Conspiracy Panics, Bratich is mostly concerned with mainstream left media outlets that act as gatekeepers in an attempt to regulate discourse surrounding conspiracy theories and retain legitimacy. He puts forth the idea of a “sphere of legitimate dissensus. It’s about what kinds of claims and knowledges can appear on the range of possible opinions,” Bratich said.

Born in Paris to Yugoslavian parents who moved to the United States when Bratich was one year old, the Missouri native says he lives a sort of double consciousness. “There is a side of me, as skeptical as I am of certain kinds of processes,” Bratich said, “that has a real belief in the bottom-up component that is what democracy is about.”