Ignorance Unmasked: Essays in the New Science of Agnotology

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

Robert N. Proctor is Professor of History at Stanford University. His books include Racial Hygiene (1988), Packaged Pleasures (2014), and Golden Holocaust (2011). Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science at Stanford University. Her books include Gendered Innovations 2 (2020), Secret Cures of Slaves (Stanford, 2017), and Plants and Empire (2004). Together, Proctor and Schiebinger are editors of Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, 2008).