On the one hand, they [conspiracy theories] are an object of study like any other phenomenon that engages the attention of social scientists and scholars in the humanities. On the other hand, conspiracy theories us a competitor of sorts. In parallel to academic research, it also is equipped to observe political events, cultural trends and economic forces. Likewise, to account for these observations, it fashions and submits explanations, often in accordance with a logic that can seem unnervingly similar to that of accredited scholarship and that at times generates discussion about a common ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. The result is a situation in which explanations seeking the imprimatur of legitimate academic research are compelled to distance themselves from conspiracy theory. This naturally results in a negative default setting, evident already in the pejorative connotations associated with the concept ‘conspiracy theory’ and its morphological variations (‘conspiracy theories’, ‘conspiracy theorist’, etc.).
A description of this situation can be refined by enlisting the notion of boundary-work outlined in the well-known essay by the sociologist of science Thomas Gieryn [‘Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists’, American Sociological Review, 1983, 48(6): 781-95] and elaborating upon his conception of scientific activity by adding a complementary notion of object-work. Boundary-work, according to Giryn, entailed the deployment of a historically and situationally variable ideology of science to justify the preferential treatment of one form of investigatory and interpretive activity over another. Consequently, this kind of work justifies its recognition of certain kinds of research and certain kinds of explanations as bona fide science by denying this recognition to other kinds of ‘non-scientific’ research and explanation. Yet scientists do not just do boundary-work. To denote the other kind of work they conduct, once they have secured research funds and built up institutional infrastructure by dint of boundary-work, one might speak of ‘object-work’. It comprises of activities such as observation, experimentation, description and theorisation. This pairing of object-work and boudary-work captures (some of) the complexities of intellectual inquiry into conspiracy theory: dealing with conspiracy theory requires researchers to multi-task by engaging simultaneously, or at least in short alteration, in both object-work and boundary-work. It requires us, for example, to approach conspiracy theories in a spirit of open-minded neutrality, just as other researches approach their objects of study, while insisting at the same time that conspiracy theories are not to be taken seriously or seen as legitimate alternatives to our own explanations; after all, boundary-work is never neutral.
Different disciplines manage these dual demands in different ways. Because conspiracy theories often submit alternative explanations for sociological phenomena, sociologists are, for example, subjected to the demands of boundary-work to a greater degree than, say, psychologists, whose explanations do not generally stand in such a competetive relationship to those of conspiracy theory – though, even here, conspiracy theory can offer itself as a mode of explanation to account for certain kinds of mental impairment and trauma for which psychologists devise distinct explanations [Showalter, E. (1997) Hystories: hysterical epidemics and modern culture, London: Picador].
[…]
And it would certainly seem that economists might have something to say about the aspect of boundary-work. After all, the experiences of depression, inflation, displacement, lay-offs and economic hardship in general have long been grist to the mill of conspiracy theorising. It would be interesting to consider the practices of demarcation with which economists seek to ensure that their explanations are not confused or conflated with those submitted by conspiracy theorists.
[…]
Today, we no longer have a trivium (logic, grammar, rhetoric) that grounds a quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music), both of which are then encyclopaedically rounded by a universalistic conception of stable knowledge. We are similarly no longer beholden to a scheme of cognitive faculties, made up of memory, reason and imagination, just as we have also abandoned the notion of a hierarchy of academic faculties whose order can potentially be called into question by a ‘conflict of the faculties’. Of course, the demise of such overarching epistemic taxonomies and architectures occasioned its own bouts of conspiracy theorising, which tended to implicate Enlightenment philosophes as the culprits guilty of subversion. Yet, leaving aside these flights of conspiracist fantasy, the service rendered in the past by these taxonomies and architectures is instructive: They regulated the relationship between the disciplines. Now that this regulative function is left unattended, the question about these relationships poses itself with an unprecedented urgency and generates calls for interdisciplinarity. Suddenly, we are forced to consider how autonomous disciplines should not only regard external reality but the other neighbouring disciplines with which they share building space on university campuses and with which they compete for student enrolments, funds, grants and public recognition, but from which they can also potentially learn and be inspired and stimulated. Gieryn has suggested that disciplines also engage in boundary-work vis-à-vis neighbouring disciplines – indeed, disciplines are disciplines because they have the ‘discipline’ to remain loyal to their own distinct perspectives – and yet this boundary-work would seemingly occur according to slightly different rules than those that apply to non-scientific knowledge (such as conspiracy theory). The call for interdisciplinarity might equate to a demand to re-evaluate these rules. Be that as it may, the first section of the handbook does not itself perform the (hard) work of interdisciplinarity but, by gathering its individual contributions and placing them in close proximity, creates conditions conducive to its occurrence. Subsequent sections of this handbook will then rise to the challenge of this work.
A second service of traditional epistemic taxonomies lay in their assurance that the field of knowledge was limited and, with sufficient diligence and adequate resources, could be mastered. That is no longer the case, and even a sub-field such as that devoted to the phenomenon of conspiracy theory demonstrates how our knowledge has become dynamic and ever-expanding. If, as noted above, that now makes it hard to keep up, the following chapters and this handbook in general might be thought to merely exacerbate the problem: yet more reading material to process! The aim of this section, however, is to provide vantage points from which to survey this rapidly expanding field of inquiry, and a map of how different disciplines make sense of conspiracy theories.
– ‘Introduction’ to section ‘Definitions and approaches’, in Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories (2020), pp. 11-4