Conspiracy theories and Geography: Who gets to say where is power?

Ridgway, Victoria

Abstract

Conspiracism has become a powerful explanatory category for major political events (Brexit vote, January 6th Capitol attack) and the subject of a diverse body of research. Yet geography has largely ignored such debates and has, on some occasions, adopted this term with little critical examination. I call on geographers to think through the implications of this silence. I especially highlight how conspiracism presents an opportunity to think through the questions of epistemic authority, the hegemonic control of knowledge production, and the limits of the regulation of dissent. I argue that further work is needed to understand the historical and spatial conditions that make it possible for practices, attitudes, and speeches to become available to be invested and discerned as a distinctive mode of thought called ‘conspiracy theories’. To that end, and drawing on Foucault's method of problematisation, I make two propositions. First, conspiracism is the performance of a critical attitude that is activated in a field conditioned by the felt pressures and limits of a collective commitment to the liberatory promise of critique. Second, conspiracism, as a collective geo-historical experience, is born from the pressures of knowing, locating, and naming power. These propositions seek to destabilise the certainties that allow conspiracism to function as a category of individualised ‘bad thinking’ by inscribing it as a collective experience held together by an ensemble of affective conditions. Having established conspiracism within this affective field, I provoke geography to think through its position, as an institutional science within this field.

Citation

Ridgway, V. (online). Conspiracy theories and Geography: Who gets to say where is power?. Dialogues in Human Geography, https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206251316008

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Nov 28, 2024
• Online Publication Date: Feb 5, 2025
• Deposit Date: Mar 10, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 10, 2025
• Journal: Dialogues in Human Geography
• Print ISSN: 2043-8206
• Electronic ISSN: 2043-8214
• Publisher: SAGE Publications
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206251316008
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3705090