ABSTRACT
Once treated as the absence of knowledge, ignorance has now become a highly influential and rapidly growing topic in its own right. This new edition of the seminal text in the field is fully revised and includes new and expanded chapters on religion; domestic law and jurisprudence; sexuality and gender studies; memory studies; international relations; psychology; decision-theory; and colonial history.
The study of ignorance has attracted growing attention across the natural and social sciences where a wide range of scholars explore the social life and political issues involved in the distribution and strategic use of not knowing. This handbook reflects the interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies by drawing contributions from economics, sociology, history, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, feminist studies, and related fields to serve as a path-breaking guide to the political, legal and social uses of ignorance in social and political life.
This book will be indispensable for anyone seeking to understand the important role played by ignorance in contemporary society, culture and politics.
Introduction 1.Revolutionary epistemology: the promise and peril of ignorance studies Part I: Remaking the philosophy of ignorance 2. Ignorance and investigation 3. Apophatic Ignorance and its Applications 4. Global white ignorance 5. On the relation between ignorance and epistemic injustice: an ignorance-first analysis 6. The Pragmatics of Ignorance 7. Popper, ignorance, and the emptiness of fallibilism 8. Literary ignorance Part II: The Production of Ignorance as a Resource: Productively Coping with Knowledge Gaps 9. Forbidden Knowledge in a Post-Truth Era 10. Ignorance and the Epistemic Choreography of Social Research 11. Sharing the Resources of Ignorance 12. Ignorance of Model Uncertainty and its Effects on Ethics and Society Using the Example of Geosciences 13. Expect the Unexpected: Experimental Music, or the Ignorance of Sound Design 14. Ignorance and the Brain: Are There Distinct Kinds of Unknowns? 15. Linguistics and ignorance Part III: Valuing and Managing the Unknown in Science, Technology, and Medicine 16. Undone science and social movements: A review and typology 17. Science: For better or worse, a source of ignorance as well as knowledge 18. Lost in Space: Place, Space, and Scale in the Production of Ignorance 19. Ignorance and Industry: Agrichemicals and Honey Bee Deaths 20. Tackling the Corona Pandemic: Managing Nonknowledge in Political Decision-Making 21. The Pandemic as we know it: Ignorance and Non-knowledge in COVID-19 Policy 22. The right not to know and the dynamics of biomedical knowledge production: fighting a losing battle? Part IV: Power, oppression and hierarchies of ignorance 23. Intersectional ignorance in women’s sport 24. Sexual Injustice and Willful Ignorance 25. Anthropological perspectives on ritual and religious ignorance 26. On the Burial of the Palestinian Nakba 27. Democracy and Practices of Ignorance Part V: Behavioral ignorance and political economy: towards a new dynamism 28. Targeting Ignorance to Change Behavior 29. Rational ignorance 30. Knowledge Resistance 31. Criminal ignorance, environmental harms and processes of denial 32. Ignorance is strength? Intelligence, security, and national secrets 33. Decision-theoretic approaches to non-knowledge in economics 34. Organizational ignorance Afterword 35. Ignorance Studies: State of the Art
