Can We Look at Refused Knowledge Differently?

The COVID-19 pandemic has clearly shown how knowledge refused by scientific institutions can be endorsed by diverse segments of our societies for addressing health, illness, and well-being. Despite this sharp evidence, the understanding of current cultural perspectives and discourses ques tioning the epistemic authority of science tends to be jeopardized by a normative view that reduces such refused knowledge to an irrational and deviant mindset to be opposed in order to preserve democracies and the well-being of our societies. Assuming an agnostic analytical stance over its epistemic value, this book aims to analyse the processes through which refused knowledge receives epistemic credibility, which people are engaged in such processes, how they relate with prevailing epistemic institutions and in which ways they practically enact a body of refused knowledge in their everyday lives. The book, drawing on an extensive three-year mixed-method empirical research, shows that it may be less helpful to frame the contestation of the authority of science in terms of an irrational “zeitgeist”, than to treat refused knowledge as a more pecu liar mode of knowing the world and ways of addressing the uncertainties that inevitably affect our everyday life. Indeed, people involved in social worlds within which refused knowledge plays a pivotal role engage a complex dialectic with prevailing scientific institutions that are increas ingly embedded in a societal landscape featured by an epistemic pluralism. As a consequence, taking refused knowledge seriously helps not only to better understand the legitimation processes that confer credibility to knowledge claims otherwise refused, but also to analyse how knowledge is, at large, the result of sociotechnical assemblages. The book thus offers a relevant contribution for scholars and students from a range of disci plines interested in the understanding of the changing relations between science, expertise and society, including Science and Technology Studies, Sociology, Media Studies, Cultural Studies, and Anthropology. At the same time, it also speaks to a wider audience concerned with the public debate over the supposed crisis of scientific expertise in the post-truth era, as well as the current mistrust towards the political and scientific estab lishment and their knowledge.