'Doing your own research'. French Yellow Vests' knowledge practices

This article examines how grassroots protesters construct everyday settings that welcome implausible or conspiratorial-sounding claims alongside others that rely on established scientific practices and authorities. Drawing on the case of the French Yellow Vests, it proposes an interactionist approach to knowledge practices that accounts for Yellow Vest claims better than frameworks that would trace their claims to a populist social location or conspiracy mindset. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, we identify three interrelated sets of knowledge practices through which activists navigated between stigmatized sources and institutional expertise. These practices did not entail a wholesale rejection of science or expertise, but enacted a critique of the field of knowledge production itself. Our framework advances the emerging line of work on knowledge practices, and can be applied to studying activist knowledge claims across a range of social positions, without assessing activists’ cognitive adequacy or privileging particular political stances.