Conspiracist knowledge geographies and the potentiality of an impossible political alliance

This paper interrogates the epistemic and spatial dimensions of conspiracy theories through the lens of knowledge geographies, foregrounding the socio-spatial infrastructures that condition the emergence, circulation, and legitimization of conspiracism. In response to Ridgway's provocation concerning geographers’ aversion to conspiracy discourses, I critique the normative deployment of ‘conspiracy theory’ as a pathologizing category that obscures the political and affective labour such narratives perform. The paper distinguishes conspiracist epistemologies from reflexive critique, while simultaneously acknowledging the complex affective investments that render conspiracy theories intelligible within marginalized or disenchanted communities. Further, it proposes the notion of an ‘impossible’ alliance, wherein leftist movements might strategically engage with conspiracist publics – not by validating epistemically closed worldviews, but by reorienting their latent anti-elite sentiments toward emancipatory political projects. By mapping the geographies of conspiracism and analysing the scalar, affective, and ideological registers through which these discourses operate, this paper articulates a call for geographers to reconceptualize conspiracism not as epistemic deviance, but as situated critique. In doing so, it opens space for a transgressive political imaginary that reclaims disaffection as a site of contestation and possibility.