“There is no way to look a conspiracy theory in the eye” – 5in10 with Aya Labanieh
Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, conspiracy, media, and memory culture. She received her PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with a dissertation entitled “One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Media” (2025). She is presently a fellow at Columbia University’s Narrative Intelligence Lab and a research affiliate with the EUME research program’s project SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. Her work contends with the intertwinement of conspiracy, memory, and power in Anglophone and Arabophone literatures and mediaspheres—spanning genres of dystopian science fiction, radical Internet subcultures, and the memoirs of agents and spies. She has published in, among others, the Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Medical Humanities, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, alongside public-facing venues such as Aeon and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

1. How would you explain your research to someone who is not an expert?
I’d tell them I study conspiracies and conspiracy theories—and the complex relationship between the two. How do real historical events that many would call “conspiracies”—like colonial spy rings, terror plots, psyops, and surveillance regimes—produce conspiracy narratives in a variety of media, from newspapers and memoirs to films and literature? How does this mixture of fact and fiction polarize people against one another, and seep into cultural memory in the aftermath? How do people use the trope of conspiracy to make sense of politics, and to tell a story about power networks, agency, and dispossession?
While the primary focus of my doctoral research—which I am presently working to turn into a monograph—is the literature and media of the modern Middle East, I’ve published on Western conspiracy media and Anglophone digital extremism as well.
2. What intrigued you when you started your academic journey?
I set out to pursue this project from a very personal place. I grew up around conspiracy theories my whole life—they were the default mode of political awareness and analysis that my family and community used to make sense of their position in the world. My parents were working class Syrian Muslims from Douma who fled Assad’s dictatorship in the 1980s and built a life in the United States. The security state they had been terrorized by their entire lives was obsessed with imagining and conjuring conspiracy. Regime informants were everywhere: your neighbor was watching you; the shopkeeper downstairs was reporting your every move; teachers at school would show little kids photos of Assad and ask them, “When this man shows up on TV, how does your dad react?”
For them, the conspiracy theory had maximal explanatory power: it could be harnessed to unravel not just the sources of Israeli occupation, US-American hegemony, and the virulent xenophobia of their daily diasporic experience, but also the proxy wars and propaganda machines of the Cold War that they grew up under, as well as the Assadist regime they had left behind. They merged real political incidents and astute postcolonial critiques with Islamic eschatology, sectarian animus, and disinformation, and the end product was a noxious and multi-faceted chimera that became fascinating to me in its own right.
I found it difficult to distill their stories into categories of truth and fiction, but it was undeniable that this ambivalent mode of knowing—the conspiracy theory—was producing its own unique analyses, affects, actions, and in-groups, and was also being harnessed by those in power to redirect political resentment and resistance. I wanted to understand how these narratives work, and why—and given the increasingly polarized worlds we now inhabit, and the flourishing of conspiracy narratives in the United States and in digital media across the globe, I could have never predicted that my fascination would become more important than ever.
3. What were formative encounters or challenges?
A major challenge of studying conspiracy theory is that it is ephemeral by definition. It has many authors, moves through many media, and disappears quickly if not captured in a cultural object (article, film, poem, etc). This ephemerality is only magnified in the digital age, where there is nothing more plentiful and more impermanent than tweets, posts, blogs, and social media accounts. Likewise, it is difficult to parse where a conspiracy theory reflects an individual sentiment or a collective one, or where its virality is driven by popular demand or dark money financing its reach.
These challenges only intensify my interest in the topic. There is no way to look a conspiracy theory in the eye: one can only study its traces, and, through a synthesis of cultural objects and their historical contexts, sketch an arc of how its narratives developed over time, and how, in many cases, they became reified and taken for granted as ways of thinking about the “enemies” in our midst.
4. What do you consider to be the role of the humanities and social sciences in times of upheaval, fragmented publics, and authoritarian transgressions?
I believe the role of the academic is to preserve knowledge across time—both by producing it (research) and by disseminating it (pedagogy). Both these strands of academic life come with a great ethical burden: our minds are resources, and as such, they can be tapped by those in power for a variety of nefarious ends, most of which lead to the destruction of knowledge and its institutions through propaganda, fear-mongering, and disinformation. It is our responsibility not only to uphold ethical and scientific standards of inquiry, but to push against the authoritarian impulse to destroy truth, rewrite history, and scapegoat the weak. It is our duty to participate in the public sphere, and bring as much of our research to non-academic audiences as possible—through classroom seminars and open lectures as well as podcasts, magazine articles, and art projects.
The primary goal of my career—both inside and outside the academy, which I see as inextricably linked—is to democratize access to knowledge and cultivate curiosity in relation to the unknown as opposed to fear. I help people develop skills such as critical thinking, close reading, and media literacy (which now includes AI literacy) in order to navigate a world designed to destroy our ability to relate to one another. Democracy is built entirely upon shared knowledge and collective deliberation: the capacity to think together, build consensus, and safely disagree. Dictators and demagogues thrive by producing the opposite: ignorance and fear, especially the fear of difference.
5. What book, article, film, exhibition or song would you recommend, and why?
What an impossible question! I’ll have to list whatever comes immediately to mind. I highly recommend Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023) for an incisive (and entertaining) analysis of how far-right extremism in the United States has gone mainstream. If you’re itching for some brilliant dystopian fiction, you have to read Omar El-Akkad’s American War (2017)—a book that imagines America’s Second Civil War (2074–2095) and offers the most captivating and heartbreaking explanation for how and why terrorists are formed.
For some contemporary resistance music, I’d love everyone to get on the Jesse Welles train with songs like “Red”.
Citation: Aya Labanieh, “There is no way to look a conspiracy theory in the eye” – 5in10 with Aya Labanieh, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 22.01.2026, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/64009
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (January 22, 2026). “There is no way to look a conspiracy theory in the eye” – 5in10 with Aya Labanieh. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved February 7, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/15jmi


