From Scientific to Syncretic Patchwork Storytelling: The Discursive Ecosystem of Italian Stop 5G Refused Knowledge Communities

The chapter delves into the Italian Stop5G movement, aiming to explore the discursive practices - media related and not - it employs to construct, stabilize and in some occasions radically transform a body of shared knowledge refused by the majority of the scientific community - in particular, regarding the effects of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiations. For this end it adopts a perspective inspired by the Social Worlds Framework (Clarke & Star 2007) - that conceives social worlds and their discourses as co-constructed - and by an ecological understanding of media (Anderson 2016) - that conceives them as a vast interconnected environment where discourses interact in different ways: sometimes competing, sometimes adapting one to the other, and sometimes again merging in new ones. Through on one year of online and offline ethnographic observation (between 2019 and 2020), interviewees to citizens and activists, and focus groups with different samples of population, it was possible to identify four phases characterizing the social world of the Stop5G movement, its discursive practices, and its shared knowledge: 1. The phase of public appeals (2017-2018), featuring scientists contesting officially accepted knowledge on electromagnetic fields; 2. The activist phase (2018-2020), with an increasing number of citizens organized in local groups participating in the social world and the arena, and adopting discursive strategy closely mirroring the ones from the previous phase; 3. An intermediate phase at the beginning of the pandemic crisis (February-April 2020), where discursive practices in the social world begun to undergo significant transformations, particularly in addressing the nature of the virus and the associated illness; 4. The pandemic phase (until the end of 2020, when observation came to and end), when discourses in the social world, with some significant exceptions, took a populist or conspiratorial turn. Forfor the Stop 5G movement these phases marked a turn from a 'scientific' to a 'syncretic' patchwork storytelling approach in the discursive practices of knowledge production and of contestation of official science. In sum, the former relied on the selection of sources strictly deemed as scientific (i.e. peer reviewd papers published in scientific journals) all confirming the harmful nature of 5G waves; the latter assembled materials from a vast array of different sources, including science, new age spiritualism, cultural critic and conspiracism. At the same time, throught these phases the 5G movement radically trandformed its organizational forms, but also the ensable of mediated and not mediated spaces employed for its communicative practices. The chapter contributes to the understanding of the tight intertwinement between the structuration of a social world and of its arena, its discursive practices – media related and not - and the shared knowledge produced by these same practices.