Publicaties
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Making Religion at Ubisoft KU Leuven
This chapter takes a look into the offices of Ubisoft Montréal, which is with 3500 staff members the biggest game studio currently in the world, and the main place of development for Assassin’s Creed during most of the franchise’s lifespan. This chapter draws on 22 interviews with Assassin’s Creed developers, including its original creator (Patrice Désilets) and most of its directors to programmers, artists, writers and others who have worked on ...
Everything Is Connected. Relocating Spiritual Power from Nature to Society KU Leuven
It is a mainstay that spiritual seekers—from New Age thinkers, neopagans, esoteric cults, or people referring to themselves as “spiritual, not religious”—imagine nature as a mysterious, spiritual, and meaningful force to counter alienating and disenchanting modernity. In this chapter, I argue that this spiritual imagination about “mysterious incalculable forces” is not necessarily projected on nature, but, perhaps increasingly, on complex modern ...
Poly-Truth, or the Limits of Pluralism: Popular Debates on Conspiracy Theories in a Post-Truth Era KU Leuven
Conspiracy theories are central to "post-truth" discussions. Official knowledge, backed by science, politics, and media, is distrusted by various people resorting to alternative (conspiratorial) explanations. While elite commentators lament the rise of such "untruths," we know little of people's everyday opinions on this topic, despite their societal ramifications. We therefore performed a qualitative content analysis of 522 comments under a ...
Picturing Opaque Power: How Conspiracy Theorists Construct Oppositional Videos on YouTube KU Leuven
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 in various online media environments. From memes on 4chan, QAnon influencers on Instagram, to flat earth or antivaxx videos on YouTube, modern-day conspiracy culture embodies compelling mediated images and narratives that are composed of various ...
Pressure to Play: Social Pressure in Online Multiplayer Games KU Leuven
Videogames cause public concerns about excessive gaming and the neglect of social relationships and obligations. This paper develops an empirically grounded, sociological explanation to understand excessive gaming. Theorizing that online multiplayer games encourage social capital acquisition, it is studied if, how and why social control is exerted over individual players. Based on in-depth interviews with 21 players three forms of social ...