The working group ‘Circuits of Mistrust and Misinformation in the Americas’ investigates the historical and contemporary dynamics of misinformation and mistrust from Alaska to Patagonia. It examines how what many describe as a ‘post-truth’ era coincides with a broader crisis of trust affecting politics, journalism, education, healthcare, and other areas of public life. The project places these current developments in context with the longer history of false narratives in the Americas, highlighting the networks and infrastructures through which misinformation and mistrust circulate in mutually reinforcing cycles.
Combining perspectives from the humanities and social sciences, the working group analyses the concrete relationships in which mistrust is negotiated and misinformation disseminated. Drawing on historical and anthropological research on fakes and frauds, and inspired by Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, the project seeks to move beyond dichotomies of victims and perpetrators to trace the circuits, understood as networks and technologies through which mistrust and misinformation spread. By attending to such dynamics, the researchers seek to clarify how asymmetric negotiations of trust shape societies and how forms of misinformation – including rumours and conspiracy theories as well as more contemporary forms such as fake news and deepfakes – both emerge from and contribute to crises of trust in different periods.
Key questions include how misinformation circulates through networks, institutions, and media technologies, and how an atmosphere of mistrust feeds into this circulation. Investigating this phenomenon, the project provides new insight into the historical and cultural dynamics of misinformation and its broader impacts on societal trust. Through its practical activities, which include organising workshops and developing a proposal for a long-term research network, the working group strengthens knowledge exchange between misinformation researchers in Europe and the Americas.
Dr Sonja Pyykkö
University of Duisburg-Essen | Institute for Anglophone Studies
E-mail: sonja.pyykkoe@uni-due.de
Sonja Pyykkö is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Anglophone Studies of the University of Duisburg-Essen. She completed her doctorate in 2025 at Freie Universität Berlin with a dissertation on the ethical and political affordances of confession as a cultural form, analysed through readings in postmodern American fiction. She has published critical and theoretical essays on confession and related topics, and is currently developing a second book project on environmental, cultural and religious anxieties in the early modern period, explored through Protestant theology and early American literature. In the working group, she contributes expertise in the cultural history of fraud and deception in North America.
Website
Dr Carlos Gerardo Zúñiga Nieto
Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen & TU Dortmund University
E-mail: carlos.zuniganieto@kwi-nrw.de
Carlos Gerardo Zúñiga Nieto is a cultural historian and an Academy in Exile Fellow based at TU Dortmund University and the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (KWI) Essen. He obtained a PhD in History from Columbia University (USA) in 2016 and has held various academic positions, including lecturer at the History Department and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, visiting assistant professor at Boston College (USA), researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Germany), and visiting researcher at the Critical Childhood Studies Centre at University College London (UK). His research spans the history of journalism, the public sphere, and the history of emotions, with a specific focus on Latin America and Mexico. Carlos is currently completing a monograph, entitled Shouting the News: Newsboys in the Making of Modern Mexico, 1870–1970.
Website
https://www.kulturwissenschaften.de/person/dr-carlos-gerardo-zuniga-nieto/
Fordham University, USA
Department of Languages and Cultures
https://www.fordham.edu/academics/departments/languages-and-cultures/faculty/carl-fischer/