“By subjugated knowledges one should understand ... a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity ... It is through the re-emergence of these low-ranking knowledges, these unqualified, even directly disqualified knowledges ... which involve what I would call a popular knowledge (le savior des gens) though it is far from being a general commonsense knowledge, but is on the contrary a particular, local, regional knowledge, a differential knowledge incapable of unanimity and which owes its force only to the harshness with which it is opposed by everything surrounding it – that it is through the re-appearance of this knowledge, of these local popular knowledges, these disqualified knowledges, that criticism performs its work.”
- Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings. 1972-1977. NY: Pantheon, 1980. p. 82.