When the call comes from inside the house

Abstract

Victoria Ridgway's ‘Conspiracy theories and geography: Who gets to say where is power?’ is an intellectual tour de force that calls us to examine critically our tendency to selectively celebrate some alternative knowledge claims while casting others beyond the pale of rationality. In spite of its considerable analytical prowess and bravery, however, I find that it stops just short of fully examining the ‘institutional production of knowledge’ it critiques. In my commentary on this article, I argue that within the context of a global backlash against expertise and collapse in trust in traditional epistemological institutions, we need to be frank about what kinds of knowledge claims are typically left out of critical human geographers’ accounts of ‘alternative’ knowledges, and offer ‘methodological empathy’ as a potential means of minimizing this selective boundary-making.