Epistemic authority, judgement, and the uncomfortable problem of conspiracism

This commentary on Victoria Ridgway's article “Conspiracy theories and Geography: Who gets to say where is power?” pushes further at Ridgway’s central claim: that geographers have largely ignored conspiracism not because it lacks relevance, but because it poses an unsettling challenge to the discipline’s assumptions about knowledge, legitimacy, and political virtue. Ridgway argues that while poststructuralist critiques have opened space for alternative knowledge systems, the academy selectively authorises certain subaltern voices while silencing others – particularly those deemed politically troubling or epistemically suspect, such as conspiracists. The commentary discusses Ridgway’s critique of how conspiracism is typically framed in academic discourse and her argument that these approaches treat conspiracism as already constituted. In response to these critiques and to her call to address conspiracism as an as yet unknown entity, I suggest that conspiracism can be examined through a lens of authority rather than power. Attention to how authority works in conspiracist spaces can help us to understand the relational, affective, and spatial conditions that produce and sustain epistemic trust in conspiracist narratives. Finally, I support Ridgway’s call for geographers to reckon with their own judgements and role in authorising knowledge, but caution that reticence and hesitation to name something merely defers and deflects the problem of judgement.