Chapter 8 is dedicated to analyze the conceptual foundations of Foucault’s archaeology of knowledge. This provides an insight into the preconceptual constitution of the “ground of depositivities” on which theories hold. Then, it discusses the criticism to it and Foucault’s answer to his critics. This led him to elaborate on the difference between “structures” and “discursive formations” and develop the different strategies needed for the reconstruction of the latter. As this chapter shows, Foucault’s perspective combines the two opposite currents, structuralism and phenomenology, to elaborate a particularly fruitful approach to intellectual history. Finally, it addresses the crucial point of how to account for epistemic mutations and what he calls its événementiel character.

Foucault problematizes the relationship between knowledge and power in ways that more traditional epistemology has not, with power always already shaping what we consider knowledge. To capture the nexus between power and knowledge, he introduces the term “episteme.” The significance of an era’s episteme is easiest to see in terms of what it does to possibilities of self-knowledge. Therefore I pay special attention to this theme by way of introducing the theoretical depth of Foucault’s notion. I then develop Foucault’s ideas further, specifically for digital lifeworlds. With this vocabulary in place, I introduce the notion of “epistemic actorhood” that lets us capture the place of an individual in a given episteme. It is in terms of this place that we can turn to the notions of epistemic rights and epistemic justice. Epistemic actorhood comes with the four roles of individual epistemic subject, collective epistemic subject, individual epistemic object, and collective epistemic object. Using this vocabulary we can then also articulate the notions of an epistemic right and of epistemic justice and develop them in the context of digital lifeworlds. Digital lifeworlds engage individuals both as knowers and knowns in new ways. The framework introduced in this chapter captures this point.

Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take climate actions via everyday professional efforts at work. In this dispersal of climate actions, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where we are witnessing a rebirth of togetherness and alternative ways of collective organising, from employee activism, activist entrepreneurship, to insider activism, shareholder activism and prosumer activism. By empirically investigating this diffuse configuration of the environmental movement with focus on renewable energy technology, the commercial footing of climate activism is uncovered. The book ethnographically illustrates how activism goes into business, and how business goes into activism, to further trace how an ‘epistemic community’ emerges through co-creation of lay knowledge, not only about renewables, but political action itself. No longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared political identity, many politicians and business leaders applaud this affluent climate ‘action’, in their efforts to reach beyond mere climate ‘adaptation’ and speed up the energy transition. Conclusively, climate activism is no longer a civic phenomenon defined by struggles, pursued by the activist as we knew it, but testament of feral proximity and horizontal organising.

I describes four kinds of knowledge and associate each with distinctive projects. What we generally refer to as positivist IR aspires to what Aristotle calls episteme: scientific knowledge that can be expressed mathematically. Interpretivist approaches aspire to phroēesis, which is best understood as practical knowledge that helps us cope with the world. This distinction cuts across paradigms and is a far more fundamental division.

Here, the authors present two justifications usually cited as sufficient to warrant patients‘ trust in physicians: professional status and individual merit. Whereas in ‘status trust’ professionalism is taken as a guarantor of trustworthiness, in ‘merit trust’ a physician’s trustworthiness is assessed individually. On either account, trust is justified by the physician’s professionalism. ‘Professionalism’ may be defined as ‘acting trustworthily’ in exchange for autonomy of decision-making, whereas trustworthiness refers to ‘competence’ in terms of episteme (theoretical knowledge), techne (craft or skill), and phronesis (practical knowledge or experience), and ‘commitment’ as ‘to act in a way that the truster approves’. The authors argue that although in principle trust in physicians is justified, since both professionalism and individually assessed trustworthiness grant derivative authority, the reality is different. because an increasing number of patients reject the concept of professionalism and, accordingly, find it difficult (or even impossible) to assess physicians’ trustworthiness. Hence, they no longer believe that their trust in physicians is justified.