Details

When: October 1-3, 2026

Where: Online

Submission Deadline: July 15, 2026

Sponsored by: The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) in Collaboration with the University of Denver

https://jcrt.org/cw/

Keynote Address: Militarizing the Mind: Cognitive Warfare from the Cold War to the Dark Web

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm

As I currently conceive it, the talk will open with three unsettling contemporary snapshots: a dark web occult repository of conspiracy theory screeds and "psychic mind-control" manuals; a NATO tactical statement declaring the human mind the "sixth domain" of warfare; and the familiar structure of a TikTok algorithmic rabbit hole. Together, these prismatic scenes suggest shared conceptions of the mind and a common repertoire of techniques for controlling perception, attention, and even thought itself. The talk will trace the emergence of these conceptions of the mind to a Cold War military industrial complex and the convergence of cybernetics, psychic research, propaganda studies, and Soviet theories of reflexive control. From these entanglements emerged many of the psychological models and informational logics that continue to govern contemporary life. Engaging Han Byung-Chul's "psychopolitics," Bernard Stiegler's account of the alienation of memory, N. Katherine Hayles account of virtual bodies, and Friedrich Kittler's insight that civilian media infrastructures are basically sedimented military technologies, I will examine how modern systems of influence increasingly operate through feedback loops designed to capture attention, circumvent deliberation, and exploit fractures in epistemic authority and trust. Having traced the construction of this mental battlespace, I ask how it might be demilitarized, or at least how we might learn to evade capture.

Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm is the Francis Christopher Oakley Third Century Professor of Religion, Chair of Science & Technology Studies at Williams College and author of The Genealogy of Genealogy: Nietzsche, Foucault, and the Coils of Critical History and Metamodernism: The Future of Theory.

The Call For Proposals

The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) invites proposals for an online conference entitled Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare: Information, Interpretation, Conspiracy, and the Struggle for Reality. The proceedings will be considered for publication in a special issue of the JCRT.

This conference investigates how beliefs, paranoia, and conspiratorial modes of knowing shape a contemporary cognitive battlespace in which actors struggle to define truth, authority, and reality itself. Drawing on Michel Foucault's Lectures on the Will to Know and Julia Kristeva's This Incredible Need to Believe (2024), we focus on practices of selective fact use and "truth-selecting" that construct alternative epistemic orders while claiming privileged access to what is "really" going on.

Rather than treating conspiracy thinking as merely political or psychological, the conference foregrounds its religious dimensions: faith in hidden powers, moral dualism, apocalyptic expectation, and hermeneutical struggle over revelatory access to the real. Conspiracy cultures routinely reproduce theological structures of knowing---visions of salvation and corruption, truth and deception, initiation and blindness. At the same time, new forms of "cognitive warfare" reframe these religious energies within state and platform attempts to govern perception, attention, and trust. Artificial intelligence, algorithmic media, and strategic information campaigns do not only deliver messages; they create digital ecologies in which suspicion becomes faith-like and revelation is continual.

The conference organizers are seeking proposals of high academic quality that take a reflective and analytical approach to both general and specific topics with international appeal or focus. We encourage contributions from scholars of religious studies, philosophy, communication, sociology, security studies, psychology, media, and related fields. Submissions should engage religion as a dynamic force---conceptually, historically, or materially---within the cognitive battlespaces of our time. We encourage contributions from a spectrum of perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.

We are not interested in papers that simply rehearse or promote particular conspiracies, or that use the conference as a platform for calling out disliked groups. We are not interested in polemics, jeremiad, or de facto advocacy pieces. Instead, we welcome theoretically informed and methodologically rigorous work that takes the religious and epistemic dimensions of cognitive conflict seriously as objects of critical inquiry.

Topics and Guiding Questions

Proposals may address, but are not limited to, the following subthemes and questions:

1. Paranoid Styles and Truth-Selecting

Religious narratives have always negotiated the boundary between revelation and delusion, authority and transgression. This subtheme explores how conspiratorial and paranoid styles echo older religious hermeneutics---selective citation, esoteric interpretation, claims to hidden truth---while retooling them in secular or digital forms. How do religious movements or quasi-religious publics narrate their privileged access to hidden realities? What theological and philosophical resources---including the Foucauldian genealogy of the "will to truth"---sustain these modes of "truth selection" and suspicion?

2. Zionism, Antisemitism, and Global Conspiracy Imaginaries

Religious symbols and myths remain central to global conspiracy thinking, and Judaism occupies a particularly charged position in these narratives. This subtheme invites analyses of antisemitic conspiracies past and present, from classical "hidden ruler" myths to their algorithmic reprints in digital culture. How do such imaginaries convert theological motifs into political paranoia? What criteria can scholars use to distinguish legitimate critique of religion or state policy from conspiratorial reinscriptions of sacred enmity and eschatological blame?

3. AI, Platforms, and Paranoid Infrastructures

Technological systems now mediate belief and belonging in ways that rival traditional religious institutions. As artificial intelligence curates information and personalizes experience, it also reconfigures how suspicion, revelation, and trust are produced and distributed. This subtheme asks whether algorithmic systems function as "paranoid infrastructures"---digital environments that reinforce particular patterns of attention and faith. How do these systems become sites of religious projection, and how do AI-generated and synthetic media intersect with conspiracy, extremism, and religious imaginary?

4. Cognitive Warfare and the Expanded Battlespace

The concepts of "cognitive warfare" and "cognitive domain operations" increasingly shape strategic and policy discourse, yet they resonate with deeply theological questions about will, truth, and freedom. When states and institutions seek to "weaponize" belief or perception, they enter into the same struggle for reality long theorized within religious and philosophical traditions. How might religious studies and critical theory help decode the sacred undercurrents of this emerging battlefield---its rituals, its eschatologies, its doctrines of purified mind and corrupted reason?

5. Ethics of Information Control and Scholarly Responsibility

Religious communities have always wrestled with the ethics of teaching, interpretation, and secrecy---questions that return urgently in the academy's role as arbiter of truth amid disinformation. This subtheme invites reflexive discussion of how scholars navigate the line between critique and amplification when studying conspiratorial or extremist movements. What responsibilities accompany the act of curating knowledge---or withholding it---in an age when information itself is the battlefield?

6. Esoteric and Speculative Knowledge

Religious and occult traditions offer rich precedents for contemporary speculative and conspiratorial epistemologies. Drawing on Michael Barkun and related theorists of stigmatized knowledge, this subtheme investigates how claims to esoteric or speculative truth function as alternative forms of knowing and meaning-making, challenging empiricist and positivist paradigms. What ethical and epistemic possibilities emerge when the speculative is taken seriously as an object of inquiry? Where are the boundaries between credible revelation, creative speculation, and dangerous delusion, and how do such claims sustain communities seeking Reality amid uncertainty?

Submission of Proposals

Contributors should send a 300--500-word abstract outlining their proposal and its relevance to the conference theme. All proposals should be submitted as email attachments to the editor at [email protected] with the subject line header: "Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare -- [Paper Title]."

Abstracts of papers, drafts of papers, or complete papers are welcome, as well as proposals for oral presentations, panel discussions, or short workshops. Accepted presenters will be invited to submit finished articles for peer review and possible inclusion in a special issue of the JCRT.

Publication

As the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory works toward a special issue on Religion, Politics, and Cognitive Warfare, our goal is to create an interdisciplinary forum for rigorous examination of these pressing issues. All conference presenters will be invited to submit finished articles for peer review. Selected articles will be published in a forthcoming special issue of the JCRT.

Queries

For questions regarding the conference or submissions, please contact the JCRT editorial office at [email protected].

Sponsored by the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT) in Collaboration with the University of Denver

jcrt.org  -  [email protected]