Conceptual+and+Annotation+Notes

The literatures on ignorance we explored this week re-situate my own research to a certain extent, or at the very least, offer a variation in the conceptual language that I am exploring my research with. In three steps, I will state my overarching research question for my current project – not being able to explore it in more – before only briefly conceptualizing the readings for this week. In the last section I pullet-point some analytical gains that the literature on ignorance offers for my own research.  In my research I ask: How do people ‘pin down’ heat differently, so they can govern heat and govern through it, and with what political implications? This question recognizes the ambivalence of heat and the diversity of ontological and epistemological orderings of heat. Heat appears as a “natural” state of temperature, a notion that is eroded specifically in context of climate change. Simultaneously knowledge about heat (and the ontologies of heat it produces and is produced in) is to be always // situated: // in its (heat’s) technological, topological, geographical and material production, in its bodily (physiological, chemical) experience, and the social and cultural technologies that revolve around dealing with heat.

The ways, thus, we make sense of heat, and where we make heat to matter, shape how we govern heat across scales, but also how we govern through heat (e.g. in context of biopolitics).

The readings of this week are of strong relevance here, particularly in regards to where heat does not matter, as it comes to matter only in very specific arenas (one of which would be explicitly in the context of climate change). The problematization of heat seems to be contained to very specific domains, and is otherwise by an large rendered invisible and/or unproblematic. One such example would be the striking ignorance of heat as a public health stressor, and of those who are to be considered specifically to be vulnerable to these stressors. These multiple dimensions of ignorance become strikingly visible in the unfolding of the European heat wave in 2003, killing 70.000 within about three weeks. Ignorance became strikingly visible there. Frickel et al (2010) show how ignorances are not only not mere knowledge “gaps”, but even more so held in place by regimes of governance, social ordering, and control, and actively reinforcing oppression, marginalization and exclusion. They show how multiple and competing groups struggle over the construction and implementation of research agendas, facing the systematic non-production of knowledge, and calling for a “new political sociology of science”. They describe how regulatory not only influence the construction and articulation of research priorities, but that the undoing of science follows actively implicit – but often also explicit – political agendas. This is notion of a politics of undone science strongly builds on what Tuana (2006) describes as the politics of ignorance, along five taxonomical categories. She carves out how ignorance, resembling the politics of standpoint feminism, should become a starting point for investigation: in order to “see” not only what we don’t know, but what is actively excluded from knowing, and how this not-knowing (ignorance) is systematically unevenly distributed to maintain oppression and control. I want to make the point that these forces are particularly strongly at play in the context of heat, its production and circulation: I argue that technological and cultural problematization of heat, as well as their fixes, are not only based on varying prioritization of what is ought to be done, and thus of what is known, but more so of what is actively rendered invisible and unthinkable. In this sense I think that heat is particularly open to re-tracing the interplay of the different categories of ignorance proposed by Tuana (including also moral ignorance, which Tuana does not touch upon).

Following the controversies around the cutting of trees in Bangalore, following the Indian government’s investing in the city’s infrastructure as to transform it into the new “tech valley”, scales of ignorance on both sides become visible as technologies of governance and control. This case further makes visible the problematic associations of vulnerability and ignorance, not only in regards of their co-production, but also in regards of the //ignorance of vulnerability//, that in itself re-produces systematic oppression held in place by ignorance, as Gibbons (2011) foregrounds. Gibbons contrasts vulnerable conceptions that are build on an ideology of invulnerability and contrasts it with the proposition of an epistemic vulnerability that stresses the sensory and the epistemological //openness to be affected by//. Frickel, Scott, Sahra Gibbon, Jeff Howard, Joanna Kempner, Gwen Ottinger, and David J. Hess (2010) “Undone Science: Charting Social Movement and Civil Society Challenges to Research Agenda Setting,” Science, Technology, and Human Values 35 (4): 444-473.   Tuana, Nancy (2006) “The Speculum of Ignorance: The Women's Health Movement and Epistemologies of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21(3): 1-19

Gilson, Erinn. "Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression." //Hypatia // 26, no. 2 (2011): 308-332.