Foucault News

Ridgway, V. (2025). Conspiracy theories and Geography: Who gets to say where is power? Dialogues in Human Geography

https://doi.org/10.1177/20438206251316008

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.

Newman, S. (2024). Fugitive Truth: Renewing the Public Sphere in the Age of Post-Truth. Javnost – The Public, 31(3), 327–342.

https://doi.org/10.1080/13183222.2024.2383904

Abstract
In the sixty years since the publication of Jürgen Habermas’ magnum opus, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the public sphere now faces a new threat in the era of “post-truth” politics. The preponderance of lies, mis/disinformation, “fake news”, “alternative facts”, conspiracy theories, and the general breakdown of trust in established sources of knowledge and information has led to the fragmentation and deepening polarisation of the public sphere – a situation deliberately promoted by right wing populist forces intent on fighting the “culture wars”. At the same time, the political space is being disrupted, in a different way, through new social movements and radical activism particularly around issues of climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and police violence. My aim is to show how these contemporary forms of dissent are engendering a new “structural” transformation of the public sphere. They create autonomous and critical spaces of collective engagement that call into question the legitimacy of dominant power structures. Understanding this process requires an alternative rendering of the relationship between truth and politics – something I develop through Michel Foucault’s rethinking of the critical impulse of the Kantian Enlightenment and his later work on parrhesia. © 2024 The Author(s).

Author Keywords
democracy; new social movements; parrhesia; populism; post-truth; Public sphere