Agnotology: The History of Knowledge and Ignorance

Harvard FAS

Historians of science have traditionally been concerned with the production of scientific knowledge, but in recent years have turned their attention to the production of ignorance. This course focuses on the production of ignorance as a social, political, cultural, economic and epistemic question, with attention both to techniques of deliberate ignorance production, and to the inadvertent and often uncontested production of ignorance that arises from accepted research…