Challenging the Institutional Politics of Life in the Making of Refused Knowledge

Refused knowledge communities (RKCs) can be analytically framed as specific social worlds, in the context of which questioning science-related epistemic, professional, and political arrangements is a crucial dimension of mutual concern. Hence, understanding refused knowledge followers’ attitudes to biomedical theories and their part in public health and healthcare systems and professional healthcare practice is urgent if we are to cast light on the conditions nurturing the legitimacy of knowledge emerging outside the boundaries of science. Against this backdrop, the aim of this chapter is to shed light on how RKCs engage in a contentious relationship with the conditions under which biomedical knowledge is shaped and mobilised by health professionals. In so doing, it elucidates how these contentious dynamics are entangled with the ways in which RKCs confer credibility and reliability on refused knowledge itself. Indeed, RKCs are not merely concerned with challenging the content of scientific and biomedical knowledge. They also question its epistemic, professional, and economic roots, that is, RKCs argue that claims and knowledge elaborated and enacted in the context of biomedicine, and the life sciences in general, are enmeshed with specific social, political, and material interests, and therefore either not to be believed or at least treated with scepticism.