Who gets to decide what counts as knowledge?
Universities, media, and funders set their own rules for which knowledge counts as legitimate. Alter Imaginaries traces what happens when knowledge is made outside those rules, and why that matters, for everyone.
There's an unwritten rule about who gets to know.
Knowledge has long been judged by measures set by the state, universities, markets, and funders. Meet them, and it's credible. Miss them, and it's dismissed as not scientific enough.
So who's actually deciding?
These five, each in its own way, decide which knowledge gets recognized as legitimate.
Who decides what counts as "scientific"?
Universities and academic journals filter which research is considered valid. The standard used to judge it, peer review, is built on Western academic norms, and rewards those who can afford years of unpaid work to reach the positions that set those norms. Research on queer or gender-nonconforming life is still often read as activism rather than scholarship, a line rarely drawn against research on straight or cisgender life.
Who decides what's "newsworthy"?
Media outlets choose which issues count as news. Those choices shape what the public treats as real or important. Labor strikes and organizing get covered as disruptions to daily life rather than as politics, and care work, whether done by mothers, fathers, or hired caregivers, rarely gets covered as real economic activity at all.
Who decides which research questions get asked?
Governments, industry, and donors fund research that serves their own interests. Topics tied to industry profit get funded fast. Research on transgender health, disability, or informal and gig labor, regardless of who's affected, routinely waits years longer for funding than research tied to a visible economic return.
Who gets believed?
The same claim is judged differently depending on who makes it. That title or official position has historically been held mostly by men, and by people who could afford higher education. Women and working-class people speaking about their own experience, of illness, of labor, of violence, have had to fight harder just to be believed as reliable witnesses to their own lives.
What knowledge never makes it into a report?
Much of this knowledge is what Indigenous and customary communities have always carried: land and ecological knowledge, rituals, oral histories passed down from ancestors, kept alive in memory and practice because no formal place was ever built to write it down.
None of these five can fully shut this knowledge out. They just change where you have to look for it.
Knowledge keeps being made, even when it isn't always acknowledged.
When knowledge has no room inside an institution, that doesn't mean it stops growing. People keep finding ways to make it, care for it, and share it.
Alter Imaginaries
That's what we're curious about. Since 2026, we've been tracing how alternative knowledge is made and cared for.
We're gathering stories, practices, conversations, and questions about how it's made, cared for, and shared across Indonesia.
Share your knowledge. This is part of our research, and also an experiment in creative method, to surface people's stories about alternative knowledge. What feels ordinary to you might be exactly the knowledge worth sharing. What everyday knowledge do you have that's rarely counted as "knowledge"?
Read this first
One of the first things to come out of this work: reflective essays gathering traces of thought and practice around alternative knowledge, from a roundtable at the Makassar International Writers Festival 2026.
Read it free →Want to see what we find next?
New stories and findings, straight to your inbox.
Stories from visitors
As a lecturer, I'm expected to write academic journals that almost no one outside campus reads. But my novel, supposedly "just fiction", got picked up by a neighborhood women's group and discussed in their book club. I realized stories sometimes travel further than any academic essay.
Being a woman lecturer is heavy work, dozens of teaching credits, dozens of theses to supervise, barely any room left for research. But I keep noticing that in casual chats between colleagues, people quietly help each other find respondents or give feedback on a draft. None of that ever shows up in a campus report, yet it's what keeps knowledge moving.
A piece of mine was once rejected by an academic outlet simply because I wasn't affiliated with any university or research institution. That made me ask: who actually gets to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge? I started a small project to give young women space to tell their own stories, without waiting for a degree or institution to validate them. One collaborator from Sumatra told me the discomfort she'd carried for years finally had a name once she joined. To me, that's proof that young people's experience is knowledge too, not just a side story.
Our small publishing outfit originally just needed storage space for books. Over time we realized we wanted more than that, a place to gather and learn together. When we moved to a market that was more wheelchair-accessible, far more people showed up than we expected. Turns out making knowledge isn't about tidy output, it's about relationships that keep growing.
I'm dyslexic and have ADHD, so the way I communicate tends to jump around and lean on a lot of emoji to get complex things across. People often read that as not serious. But that's just how I think. Turns out what gets written off as "messy" might actually be knowledge worth listening to.
Write a note of 100–500 words:
Across the different roles and jobs you've held or are holding now, what experience has most shaped how you produce knowledge — including the ways that formal institutions often don't recognize?
To make it easier to start: