Institutions and Politics of Ignorance

Catalog description

In this course, we take the well-worn phrase “knowledge is power” and flip it on its head in order to study the ways in which ignorance -- especially in its culturally induced and socially constructed form -- has been harnessed as a political instrument to consolidate power and promote special interests. Ignorance here is much more than the absence of knowledge, or its mere opposite. Rather, our focus is on the ways in which the deliberate production and preservation of ignorance by domestic and/or foreign agents has increasingly become a constitutive feature of the policy making process in democratic and non-democratic societies alike.