ABSTRACT
In his 1995 Annual Review of Sociology essay, Steven Shapin identified the central conceptual problem in the sociology of scientific knowledge as “how to interpret the relationship between the local settings in which scientific knowledge is produced and the unique efficiency with which such knowledge seems to travel” (1995: 290). Coming close on the heels of important edited volumes by Pickering (1992) and Clarke and Fujimura (1992) and marking the cultural turn in science and technology studies (STS), Shapin’s essay was widely cited and helped solidify the field’s contemporary focus on the cultural practices that first generate and then circulate scientific knowledge.The essay’s title “Here and Everywhere” signified the field’s focal attention to these dual processes. But if Shapin’s framing accurately portrayed the state of STS research in the mid-1990s, it
failed to capture the full range of the conceptual problems facing the field then and today. Specifically, it did not consider how knowledge production is forestalled or how the transmission of knowledge from one place to others is constrained. Lots of knowledge that could be made isn’t and when knowledge circulates it does not do so uniformly. In fact, scientific knowledge is not “here and everywhere” and STS should have interesting things to say about how and why that is. I believe a reformulation of the problem is needed, one that better highlights the relational dynamics of knowledge production and non-production:Why are certain kinds of scientific knowledge created, certified and circulated while other kinds are not? Answers to this seemingly straightforward question are not easy to come by. Half a century
has passed since Thomas Kuhn (1962) published his endogenous social theory of knowledge growth, yet there are few empirically-substantiated explanations for the variation we see in rates, processes, and forms of intellectual change (Frickel and Gross 2005).That is, if we think we know quite a lot about why some areas of scientific research and expertise flourish, we still know relatively little about why other areas wither on the vine and still others – no doubt most – simply fail to germinate … or perhaps not so simply fail. This chapter considers the hidden half of the knowledge production/non-production equa-
tion and calls for greater scholarly attention to the problem of ignorance or the absence of knowledge2. It covers a range of issues, but focuses mainly on how, where, and why ignorance, once produced, becomes institutionalized within and beyond science. Like knowledge, the production of ignorance can also be local and situational. However, over time different types of
ignorance accumulate and combine to create complex architectures or structures of nonknowledge.These structures reflect and reinforce a range of social values and power relations and are significant for their consequences, both intended and unintended. Studying the processes, structures, and impacts of institutionalized ignorance is not easy, in part because such absences are rarely visible or readily apparent, but also in part because the values and power relations dominating STS in recent decades have tended to channel analytical attention toward the centers of scientific power (see Hess 2011).To render ignorance and its effects more visible and thus more available as a productive element of theory and research design, STS will need to spend more time and energy at the peripheries of scientific action and among the experts and non-experts who inhabit those marginalized spaces and positions (see Hecht 2009 and Chapter 20 of this book).
