Diffusion of provocative ideas in the time of COVID-19

With the COVID-19 crisis, we’re gaining an education in the effect of social networks on how disease spreads. These same concepts can help us understand the spread of ideas that foment conflict. With our lived experience now including ‘transmission rates’, ‘virality’, exponential growth’ and the need for mitigation, we can more readily recognize that ideas, like viruses, disperse through a social network. How can this new understanding affect our research and practice? In this roundtable session, participants will invited to share the ways they have explicitly recognized the spread of ideas in their work; explore implications for conflict and conflict resolution; and identify opportunities for further work.