• Ignorance Unmasked
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Ignorance Unmasked

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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 U...
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  • 16 September 2025
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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

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Price: $26.00
Pages: 302
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Publication Date: 16 September 2025
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9781503643956
Format: Paperback
BISACs:

"'Agnotology,' [the] science of generating ignorance, has become the most important discipline of the day." —Bruno Latour, Sciences Po, Paris
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).
Preface
 —Robert N. Proctor
1. Agnotology, Thirty Years in the Making
 —Robert N. Proctor
2. How the Most Important Fact of Global Warming Has Been Obscured
 —Benjamin Franta
3. Preventing Unwanted Births Can Help Mitigate Climate Change—While Enlarging Human Liberties
 —Londa Schiebinger and Robert N. Proctor
4. AI-Fueled Ignorance, Confusion, and Profit
 —Hany Farid
5. On Data Loss and Disappearance in Digital Societies
 —Nanna Bonde Thylstrup
6. Law against Knowledge: Anti-Epistemology
 —Peter Galison
7. Why We Wrongly Imagine Adam Smith as a Free Market Fundamentalist
 —Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
8. Gun-Lobby Agnotology: Degrading the Truth about Firearms
 —John J. Donohuevi
9. Gluttony and Sloth? Personal Responsibility versus the True Cause of Obesity
 —Robert H. Lustig
10. How Big Meat Has Created and Legitimized Ignorance
 —Jennifer Jacquet
11. On the Burial of the Palestinian Nakba
 —Rosemary Sayigh
12. Euphemism in the Architecture and Language of Treblinka
 —Daniel Akselrad
13. Hiram Powers, Black Agnotology, and Segregated Art History
 —Caroline A. Jones
14. "Civilian" Ignorance, American Militarism, and the Post-9/11 Wars
 —Nadia Abu El-Haj
Contributors
Notes
Index