Ignorance Unmasked

We live in an age of ignorance. This book offers a guide to how we got here—and how we might escape.

From obfuscations of climate science to the myriad deceptions inhering in language, Ignorance Unmasked explores how agnotology—the study of ignorance—can help us better grasp: Why don't we know what we don't know? What are the obstacles to knowledge, and how might those be overcome?

Ignorance has countless agents and authors; it gets deliberately manufactured and widely disseminated. In a provocative set of essays, this book engages climate change and public health, algorithmic amplification of misinformation, deep fakes and data obsolescence, the origins of free market fundamentalism and gun industry deceptions, along with the ignorance produced by military trauma, sugar and meat agnotology, environmental malfeasance, and the forgetting of the Nakba. It helps us better understand how and why knowledge gets erased, and how rectifying such ignorance can enlarge human liberties and planetary health.

Contributors: Nadia Abu El-Haj, Daniel Akselrad, Erik M. Conway, John Donohue, Hany Farid, Benjamin Franta, Peter Galison, Jennifer Jacquet, Caroline A. Jones, Robert Lustig, Naomi Oreskes, Robert N. Proctor, Rosemary Sayigh, Londa Schiebinger, and Nanna Bonde Thylstrup

"The essays in Proctor and Schiebinger's spectacular new collection make the concept of agnotology, the creation of ignorance, relevant to the most basic political and scientific battles of the day—from the controversies over the Israeli destruction of Gaza through climate science and food production. This should be read by all social scientists interested in our modern world." —David Rosner, Columbia University

"'Agnotology,' [the] science of generating ignorance, has become the most important discipline of the day." —Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris