Embracing Aporia?: The Lessons of Popular Knowledge

Offering a theoretical analysis that simultaneously abjures a traditional thesis, claims wide-ranging associative liberties, and insists on the groundlessness of all truth-making, Birchall engages in a tricky balancing act; the book aims to level the relationship between academic studies and popular knowledge-production and yet, almost paradoxically, to define a more radical role for cultural studies. [...]traditional analyses of phenomena such as conspiracy or gossip are insufficient if they leave intact an assumed hierarchy dividing the putative experts from those whose practices are studied. [...]gossip and conspiracy theory model the epistemological instruction popular culture can offer. Here instability is not something to bemoan, but rather a condition to make peace with-or even make the most of-like the suspension of the gold standard or the dynamic of unfettered exchange.