Abby Kinchy, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Scott Frickel, Brown University; Nathalia Hernandez Vidal
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês, Spanish/Español/Espanhol
Social studies of ignorance are a powerful means of illuminating how science and technology contribute to and are intertwined with systems of inequality and oppression. In this session, we ask how geographical concepts–such as place, space, and scale–can enhance social studies of scientific ignorance and related topics (absence, domains of imperceptibility, invisibilization, non-knowledge, undone science) and strengthen our capacity to understand and reconfigure social relations and power structures.
Ignorance is an idea whose description is curiously tethered to the spatial: gaps, gulfs, blind spots, periphery, or distance. Knowledge claims are produced and certified in certain places; likewise, ignorance, irreducibly intertwined with knowledge, “takes place” in ways that mark it as local too. Ignorance can attach to place through spatial processes of geographical exclusion: some places do not attract the attention of science, resulting in the non-production of knowledge about those places and the people who live and work there. Geographical scale also matters, affecting the kinds of scientific questions that are asked and answered, and what topics or ideas are treated as uninteresting, irrelevant, or remain invisible and thus unacknowledged. For instance, ignorance about environmental problems can be produced not only by the failure to aggregate observations, but also by aggregating data at an inappropriately small or large scale. Therefore, in this session, we seek to convene scholars whose research offers conceptual insights about the problem of ignorance and geographical space.
