13/12/24

‘Agnotologías’, a new publication on ignorance studies from the Institut Interuniversitari López Piñero.

Under the coordination of José Ramón Bertomeu, Clara Florensa and Agustí Nieto, the collective book "Agnotologías. Saberes e ignorancias en la España del siglo XX" has been published by Tirant lo Blanch. This book is the result of two coordinated research projects (PID2019-106743GB-C21 and C22) funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033. The research team, made up of more than a dozen researchers, has thus explored various forms of production of knowledge and ignorance in 20th century Spain. The subproject ‘Tóxics invisibles’ (coordinated by José Ramón Bertomeu at the IILP-UV) has addressed the invisibility of toxic risks through different areas: agriculture, occupational health, mining and pharmacy. The subproject ‘Sabers invisibles’ (coordinated by Agustí Nieto, IHC-UAB) explored the creation of ignorance in censorship practices and activities related to scientific dissemination.

The book ‘Agnotologies’ has been born and grown with the collaboration of the members of these projects. It has been nurtured by exchanges of proposals and drafts and discussions at various academic meetings and conference sessions over the past four years. By mobilising a wide range of primary sources and a varied critical literature, the authors of the book have investigated the interactions between discursive constructions, socio-technological objects, expert knowledge, spurious interests, decision-making and various forms of social activism. With these general approaches, the coordinated project is designed to foster synergies between different lines of research and to address the dangers of fragmentation and insignificance.

Over a decade ago, the expression ‘agnotology’ (the study of ignorance) was popularised as a mirror image of epistemology (the study of knowledge). This book critically adopts this recent historiography to analyse several cases from twentieth-century Spain. The main conclusion of the book is the plurality of forms of production of ignorance that sometimes appear combined, without solution of continuity, within the cases studied. Some knowledge never reached its potential recipients because it was concealed, expurgated or distorted. Other knowledge was never produced due to lack of academic interest, institutional support or lack of material and human resources. Some was disavowed or transformed into false controversies, manufactured uncertainty, often designed to avoid potentially damaging regulations for the most powerful groups.

The book thus addresses a new political history of science, technology and medicine through a set of particular cases, analysed from the multiple perspectives of the new studies on ignorance: the toxic risk of pesticides, the occupational hazards of paints, government censorship and self-censorship of science communicators, radiological protection in the face of nuclear catastrophes, experimental treatments of leprosy with drugs such as thalidomide, the salinisation of rivers caused and hidden by industries with rhetorics of naturalisation, the various alternatives and choice of content in sex education, the disciplinary beginnings of environmental education, research policies in the basic medical sciences, the deliberate creation of doubts about climate change, etc. These historical examples transport us to contexts marked by various forms of violence and by strong inequalities that affect the social management of knowledge and ignorance in various medical, technological, scientific or environmental issues. The episodes analysed in this book are complex socio-material phenomena that have to be explained through the analysis of social, cultural, material, medical and environmental issues, with relative importance depending on the case in question.