The concern of this chapter is how urban studies, despite the vividly accumulated strand of critical theorizing, contribute to the commodifying of research by knowing the city along academic trajectories that privilege instrumental knowledge rather than critical reflection and responsiveness to those marginalized. Academia is thus complicit to the enactment of territorial stigmatization due to the institutions’ bias in favor of elite groups and knowledge brokers navigating the industry/knowledge/political-power nexus (Allen and Imrie, 2010; May and Perry, 2018). Academia is thus enrolled in stigmatizing practices that frame territories and populations as fundamentally ‘other.’ The chapter critiques dominant urban studies, especially social science projects addressing “marginalized neighborhoods” in Sweden. Two typologies of academic production are highlighted: the Exorcist, which seeks to purge social ‘problems’ rather than examine their structural causes mystifying social misery as self-evident, static, and place-bound; and the Exotist, which opposes this yet, through structural theorizing, reproduces narratives of otherness. Exotist research, including my own, often romanticizes alienation, resistance, or local solidarity while neglecting comparative or contextual analysis.

These academic productions impede richer understandings of advanced marginality, overemphasizing specific urban spaces as pathological or promising, ignoring the cultural political economy of uneven development under rapid urbanization (Sum and Jessop, 2013). The chapter thus reflects on epistemic injustice within the global knowledge order, shaped by the politicization of academia under neoliberal governance, while tentatively suggesting alternative agendas.