*Dates*: August 29 & 30, 2017**
*Location*: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston, USA
*Organizer*: Mark Robinson, Creighton University School of
Medicine
*Website:* http://tinyurl.com/jbf8afp
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How do we make sense of the increasing role of ignorance or
problematic facts in knowledge regimes? The social mechanics
of truth and knowledge have been a central concern within
Science, Technology and Society (STS). Yet, the engineering of
ignorance and the sense of an increasing imperviousness to
facts/knowledge show brightly the limits of analytical
approaches to science, technology, and innovation that ignore
the role of political economy in contemporary knowledge
practices. Important questions about the shaky status of facts
— and the vicissitudes of knowers — emerge in a panoply of
contexts: in the spread and purchase of myths through digital
platforms; in the growing acknowledgement of large-scale
scientific irreproducibility / unreliability; in the
increasingly commercial imperatives placed upon academic
knowledge production; and as highlighted in recent anxieties
about strategic public ignorance and global democratic
politics. In each context, one sees the fragility of
approaches that assume that we are all rational actors working
with — or even beholden to — uncompromised facts.
Considerations of agnotology–the area concerned with the
emergence, use, and instrumentalization of ignorance—has
become rather urgent in light of recent sociopolitical events
marked by the sense of an increasing imperviousness to formal
modes of knowledge and knowing, reflecting what some have
termed, a post-truth <http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37995600>,
post-factual society. Breathless critics point to seismic U.S.
and global political shifts such as Brexit, the recent U.S.
elections, and the rise of the far right in Europe as evidence
of a mounting epistemic crisis — an unceremonious dethroning
of truth, facts, and rationality.
Yet, and perhaps paradoxically, these epistemic crises also
show the power and purchase of alternative universes of
knowing — alternative worlds replete with their own logics,
beliefs, and systems of veridiction and value. It also brings
into view the way that unstable, complex or problematic
knowledge works in tandem with or as a key component within
larger social and economic paradigms. Agnotology (Proctor and
Schiebinger 2008) references the “cultural inducement” of
ignorance and false knowledge. However, what the agnotological
impulse also reveals, especially in its more postmodern sense
(Mirowski 2013), is the glaring limits of knowledge models
that willfully ignore the technologies and techniques that
enable and engineer ignorance and the subsequent
instrumentalizing or capitalization of problematic,
unverified, contested or merely promised//knowledge. In this
world, gilded visions of social, political and technological
futures obscure long, flagrant histories of failed promises;
empirically impossible promises are conferred the status of
actualizable futures. Ways of mapping or understanding
technoscience and innovation that rely on decontextualized
epistemic assumptions reproduce a long debunked strain of
determinism whereby facts and knowledge are understood to be
the primary animating force that powers decisions, behaviors,
institutions, emergence and belief. Perhaps, even the notion
of agnotology itself performs such a determinism by treating
ignorance as /marginal/– as rare, rather than prolific or
perhaps, inherent to knowledge practices. At the same time,
the recent focus on issues of value and valuation returns our
attention to the ways that knowledge practices operate as
sites for the engineering and enactment of particular values
(Dussage, et al 2015) in a variety of domains from global
health (Adams, et al 2016) to the global bioeconomy (Birch
2016). In each case, value(s) warrant intervening and
transforming knowledge systems and infrastructures.
For political economic analyses of knowledge change, knowledge
has always been inextricable from the economic and political.
Larger considerations of culture, sociopolitical systems and
economic formations (Lave, et al 2010) were inextricable from
theorizations of technoscience, knowledge programs and
political ideologies. Much like the agnotological lens,
political economy necessarily redirects our analyses towards
institutions, economic imperatives, charismatic actors,
culture and myth, promissory economies, the cultivation of
susceptible subjects, the strategic use of complexity, and the
workings of political systems as key components in the
analysis of knowledge modes, especially as they animate
technoscience and innovation. Yet, perhaps our attention ought
to consider the challenge of changing knowers. More than ever,
recent events have brought into relief the role of knowers’
/orientations/ (Beckert 2016; Harding 1993; Robinson,
forthcoming) in analyses of knowledge transformation.
We invite papers that explore a wide range of approaches to
these themes, including the following:
*
The Precarity of the Expert / The Fact
*
Freedom from Expertise / The Politics of Expertise
*
Values and Valuation in Science, Technology and Medicine
*
The Risks of Knowing & Knowledge
*
The Economics of the Unknown / Known
*
Evaluating Unstable or Unproven Knowledge
*
The Geography of Alternative Knowledge
*
Diverse Knowers and Knowing / Feminist Knowledge
*
New Approaches in Social Epistemology
*
Fruitful Falsehoods / Meaningless Facts / The Politics of
Deniability
*
Commercial Imperatives in Research and Innovation
*
Scientific Ambiguity and Environmental Science
*
Pharmaceutical Markets / Clinical Ambiguity
*
Social Media & The Geography of Rumours
*
Complexity and Scientific Decision-making
Exploring case studies from science, technology, medicine as
well as economics and innovation, this workshop aims to bring
together a broad range of scholarship across a variety of
fields and approaches.
Please send proposals and questions to *both *MarkRobinson (@)
creighton.eduand EmmaWojnicki [@]creighton.edu. Send abstracts
by February 18, 2017.
*Advisory Panel:*
* Kean Birch <http://www.keanbirch.net/>, York University, Canada
* Pierre Delvenne
<http://www.spiral.ulg.ac.be/fr/presentation/equipe-spiral-a-z/pierre-delvenne/>,
Université de Liège, Belgium
* Ine Van Hoyweghen
<http://www.kuleuven.be/wieiswie/en/person/00013249>, KU Leuven, Belgium
* Rebecca Lave <http://geography.indiana.edu/faculty/lave.shtml>,
Indiana University Bloomington, USA
* David Tyfield
<http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/lec/about-us/people/david-tyfield>,
Lancaster University, UK
* Samantha Vanderslott
<https://www.ucl.ac.uk/sts/students/Vanderslott>, UCL, UK
On The Limits of Knowing: Ignorance, Promises and Political Economy
of Knowledge
December 29, 2016
<https://politicaleconomyoftechnoscience.wordpress.com/2016/12/29/on-the-limits-of-knowing-ignorance-promises-and-political-economy-of-knowledge/>
