The working title of this PhD research is Haunted by Lost Futures, pursued part-time at York St John University under the supervision of Dr Robert Edgar.
The research sits at the intersection of hauntological theory, digital ostension, and online conspiracy culture. It is grounded in the idea — developed by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher, drawing on Jacques Derrida — that contemporary culture is haunted by the futures it failed to reach: by possibilities that were foreclosed, by ways of living that never materialised, by the persistent presence of what might have been.
The central question is deceptively simple: what happens when that haunting migrates online? When communities form around shared senses of loss, betrayal, or conspiracy, and when those communities construct elaborate alternative realities through forums, feeds, and digital folklore — what are the social and cultural mechanisms at work?
Theoretical Framework
The research draws on a range of theoretical traditions. Hauntological theory — rooted in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx and developed by Fisher in Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life — provides the central conceptual lens. This is placed in dialogue with digital ostension (the process by which online communities enact and perform folk narratives), Gramscian analysis of hegemony and counter-narrative, and the sociology of knowledge.
Methods
Primary sociological methods include ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, applied to the study of online conspiracy communities as sites of meaning-making and social reality construction. The research also draws on digital ethnography and archival methods.
Significance
At a moment when conspiracy culture has moved from the margins to the mainstream of political and social life, understanding how these narratives form, spread, and sustain themselves feels both academically urgent and practically important. This research aims to contribute to that understanding by taking the cultural and emotional dimensions of conspiracy belief seriously — not as pathology, but as a form of meaning-making in a world that feels increasingly haunted by its own unrealised possibilities.
Haunted by Lost Futures 