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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 a wide range of topics.
List of contents
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
About the author
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).
Summary
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 a wide range of topics.
