2nd Edition
Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies
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.
Chapter 21 of this book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.
Introduction
- Revolutionary epistemology: the promise and peril of ignorance studies
- Ignorance and investigation
- Apophatic Ignorance and its Applications
- Global white ignorance
- On the relation between ignorance and epistemic injustice: an ignorance-first analysis
- The Pragmatics of Ignorance
- Popper, ignorance, and the emptiness of fallibilism
- Literary ignorance
- Forbidden Knowledge in a Post-Truth Era
- Ignorance and the Epistemic Choreography of Social Research
- Sharing the Resources of Ignorance
- Ignorance of Model Uncertainty and its Effects on Ethics and Society Using the Example of Geosciences
- Expect the Unexpected: Experimental Music, or the Ignorance of Sound Design
- Ignorance and the Brain: Are There Distinct Kinds of Unknowns?
- Linguistics and ignorance
- Undone science and social movements: A review and typology
- Science: For better or worse, a source of ignorance as well as knowledge
Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey
Part I
Remaking the philosophy of ignorance
Jens Haas and Katja Vogt
William Franke
Charles W. Mills
Zara Bain
Mathias Girel
Shterna Friedman
Andrew Bennett
Part II
The Production of Ignorance as a Resource: Productively Coping with Knowledge Gaps
Joanna Kempner
Mike Michael
Stuart Firestein
Hendrik Paasche, Alena Bleicher, Wulf Loh, Tobias Weigel
Basile Zimmermann
Michael Smithson and Helen Pushkarskaya
Nina Janich and Anne Simmerling
Part III
Valuing and Managing the Unknown in Science, Technology, and Medicine
David J. Hess
Janet A. Kourany
18. Lost in Space: Place, Space, and Scale in the Production of Ignorance
Scott Frickel and Abby Kinchy
19. Ignorance and Industry: Agrichemicals and Honey Bee Deaths
Daniel Lee Kleinman and Sainath Suryanarayanan
20. Tackling the Corona Pandemic: Managing Nonknowledge in Political Decision-Making
Jaana Parviainen, Anne Koski, Paula Alanen
21. The Pandemic as we know it: Ignorance and Non-knowledge in COVID-19 Policy
Katharina Paul and Christian Haddad
22. The right not to know and the dynamics of biomedical knowledge production: fighting a losing battle?
Peter Wehling
Part IV
Power, oppression and hierarchies of ignorance
23. Intersectional ignorance in women’s sport
Madeline Pape
24. Sexual Injustice and Willful Ignorance
Erinn Gilson
25. Anthropological perspectives on ritual and religious ignorance
Liana Chua
26. On the Burial of the Palestinian Nakba
Rosemary Sayigh
27. Democracy and Practices of Ignorance
Lev Marder
Part V
Behavioral ignorance and political economy: towards a new dynamism
28. Targeting Ignorance to Change Behavior
Deborah A. Prentice
29. Rational ignorance
Ilya Somin
30. Knowledge Resistance
Mikael Klintman
31. Criminal ignorance, environmental harms and processes of denial
Darren Thiel and Nigel South
32. Ignorance is strength? Intelligence, security, and national secrets
Brian Rappert and Brian Balmer
33. Decision-theoretic approaches to non-knowledge in economics
Ekaterina Svetlova and Henk van Elst
34. Organizational ignorance
Joanne Roberts
Afterword
35. Ignorance Studies: State of the Art
Michael Smithson
Biography
Matthias Gross is professor at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Jena and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, UFZ in Leipzig, Germany, where he is also head of the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology. Among his recent books are the Oxford Handbook of Energy and Society (2018, ed. with Debra Davidson) and Green European (2017, ed. with Audrone Telesiene).
Linsey McGoey is professor of sociology and Director of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation (CRESI) at the University of Essex, UK. She works on epistemology, ignorance, political economy and economic justice. Her books include No Such Thing as a Free Gift (2015) and The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules the World (2019).