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

• In Event: 50462 - Section on Science, Knowledge, and Technology Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 8: Epistemologies

Abstract

The French Yellow Vests (YV) movement began in November 2018 as a widespread, leaderless protest against rising fuel taxes. It quickly broadened to demands for social and fiscal justice, driven by diverse participants with no clear political affiliation. The movement lost momentum in 2019 and further declined with Covid-19 lockdowns. Yet, many activists continued to gather, shifting their focus to opposing public health measures. They started promoting "doing your own research" in the face of unprecedented events, rather than blindly adhering to official authorities. The epistemic basis of their demands became increasingly ambiguous.
Drawing on ethnographic accounts of day-to-day YV activity in the Paris and Var regions and 74 biographical interviews with protesters, our findings show that YVs sometimes grounded their claims in verifiable fact and spoke in carefully deliberative ways, yet sometimes they sounded fantastical. Sometimes they bashed elites, yet other times their claims depended explicitly on professional expertise. This paper asks how YVs constructed this odd combination of statements which confounds established approaches to protest activity. The anomaly gave us the opportunity to develop a new framework for understanding how collective actors construct knowledge claims in everyday settings. We propose it can be useful for examining a variety of social movements, beyond the YVs and across the political spectrum.
We argue that with a focus on knowledge practices in social settings, we grasp the YVs’ peculiar combination of claims better than if analyzed in terms of “conspiracy theory” or “populism.” Our approach highlights situated patterns of interaction, rather than a type of claimant. We discovered that, through expressions like "do your own research!" YV activists adopt knowledge practices that create settings where diverse knowledge claims are allowed to coexist. Together, these practices challenge the field of legitimate knowledge production itself, beyond merely challenging institutions or knowledge authorities.

Authors

• Alexandre Dafflon

• Zakaria Bendali, University of Lausanne

• Paul R. Lichterman, University of Southern California