Abstract
What is not of concern in social and political life is the ever-shifting shadow to what is of concern.1 At any one time only certain topics will garner the limelight in public discussions. Yet, what remains off the agenda can be judged to be equally, if not more, important than what is so. This is perhaps most obviously evident in the manner priorities change over time and across locations. Swine flu, human trafficking, animal experimentation, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola outbreaks are just some instances of topics that have waxed and waned as matters of apprehension.
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See, for instance, Francis, L.P., Battin, M.P., Jacobson, J.A., Smith, C.B., and Botkin, J. 2005. “How infectious diseases got left out—And what this omission might have meant for bioethics,” Bioethics 19(4): 307–322.
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Although there have been those that have crossed over this divide, for instance, Wright, S. (ed.). 2001. Biological Warfare and Disarmament. London: Rowman & Littlefield; and
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Noë, Alva. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: Chapter 5. In a similar vein, entering an abandoned house can evoke a sense who was there before.
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See Hetherington, Kevin. 2004. “Secondhandedness: Consumption, disposal, and absent presence,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22: 157–173.
For an examination of the ascetics of redaction, see Office of Experiments. 2013. “On being overt secrecy and covert culture,” in Elizabeth Fisher and Rebecca Fortnum (eds). On Not Knowing. London: Kettle’s Yard.
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See Rappert, B. 2012. How to Look Good in a War. London: Pluto: Chapter 1.
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Despite notable exceptions, including Bille, Mikkel, Frida Hastrup, and Tim Flohr Sorensen, (eds). 2012. An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. New York: Springer and
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Just as new topics come into the fore over time, others recede in the background. Today, some have argued that the relation between genetics, race, and intelligence has become a kind of “forbidden knowledge” among (American) sociologists due to its political potency; see Kempner, J., Merz, J.F., and Bosk, C.L. 2011. “Forbidden knowledge: Public controversy and the production of nonknowledge,” Sociological Forum 26(3): 475–500.
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For an example of one attempt to set out an epistemology of ignorance, see Mills, Charles. 1997. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. For explicit analysis of ignorance with regard to science, see the Special Issue of Science Communication Volume 15 Number 2.
Croissant, J. 2014. “Agnotology: Ignorance and absence, or towards a sociology of things that aren’t there,” Social Epistemology 28(1): 4–25.
For example, Dilley, R. 2010. “Reflections on knowledge practices and the problem of ignorance,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16: S176–S192 and
Chua, L. 2009. “To know or not to know? Practices of knowledge and ignorance among Bidayuhs in an ‘impurely’ Christian world,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 15: 332–348. Although in contrast see
Mair, Jonathan, Kelly, Ann, and Casey High. 2012. “Making ignorance an ethnographic object,” in Casey High, A. Kelly, and J. Mair (eds). The Anthropology of Ignorance. New York: Palgrave: 1–32.
As well, attempts to counter a perceived absence of social analysis of ignorance through greater social research analysis can hazard the very production of ignorance by academics if the actions of social actors are attributed with too much coherence and intentionality. See Rappert, B. 2012. “States of ignorance: The unmaking and remaking of death tolls,” Economy and Society 41(1): 42–63.
Some of the language about absences in social research hazards forwarding nonentities as objects for study, as in Fowles’s suggestion that “Absences push back and resist. They prompt us into action. And like present things, absences also have their distinctive affordances and material consequences.” Fowles, S. 2010. “People without things,” in M. Bille et al. (eds) An Anthropology of Absence: Materializations of Transcendence and Loss. Berlin: Springer: 24, quoted from Meyer. 2012. “Placing and tracing absence”.
Rappert, B. 2013. “Present absences: Hauntings and whirlwinds in -graphy,” Social Epistemology 28(1): 41–55.
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See, for example, Fricker, M. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press;
Ginzburg. 1980. The Cheese and the Worms; Mazzei. “Inhabited silences” and Franke. 2007. On What Cannot be Said.
See, for instance, Gusfield, J. 1981. The Culture of Public Problems: Drinking-Driving and the Symbolic Order. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press; Dimitrov, Sprinz, DiGusto, and Kelle. 2007. “International nonregimes”; and
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As argued by Bacchi, C. L. 1999. Women, Policy and Politics. London: Sage
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Chambliss, D. 1996. Beyond Caring: Hospitals, Nurses and the Social Organization of Ethics. London: University of Chicago Press. See as well
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See Balmer, Brian (2012) Secrecy and Science: A Historical Sociology of Biological and Chemical Warfare. Farnham: Ashgate on scientific advisors as “socially legitimated doubters.”
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For a discussion of such issues, see Social Problems 39(1): 35–39 and Gordon, A. 1993 “Twenty-two theses on social constructionism,” in J. Holstein and G. Miller (eds). Reconsidering Social Constructionism. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
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On this point see Silverman, C. 2012. Understanding Autism. Oxford: Princeton University Press.
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See as well Vertesi, J. 2014. “Drawing as,” in C. Coopmans, J. Vertesi, M.E. Lynch, and S. Woolgar (eds). Representation in Scientifi c Practice Revisited. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
As examples of alternative ontological politics, see Papadopoulos, D. 2014. “The politics of matter,” Social Epistemology 28(1): 70–85 and
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. 2014. “Encountering bioinfrastructure: Ecological struggles and the sciences of soil,” Social Epistemology 28(1): 26–40.
The notion that classical neoliberal economics cultivates habits of thinking that systematically miss out on major facets of the economy—such as private debt and money—is one that has been made with renewed vigor since 2008 financial crises. See Keen, S. 2011. Debunking Economics: The Naked Emperor Dethroned? London: Zed. For another account of institutionalized blindness, see
Das, Satyajit. 2006. Traders, Guns & Money. Harlow: Pearson Education Limited.
See Bull, M. 1999. Seeing Things Hidden. London: Verso and
Howes, D. 1991. “Introduction,” in D. Howes (ed.). The Varieties of Sensory Experience: A Sourcebook in the Anthropology of the Senses. Toronto: University of Toronto Press: 3–21.
For instance, as pursued by Haraway in her efforts to reclaim the vision as an embodied type of knowing rather than a type of knowing that sees everything from nowhere. Haraway, Donna. 1988. “Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial,” Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
See Walsh. 1998. The Dark Matter of Words: 3–4.
As taken up by Noë, Alva. 2012. Varieties of Presence.
On these last two points, perceptual presences are discussed in-depth in Noë, Alva. 2012. Varieties of Presence.
A metaphor for information pursued in Tsoukas, Haridimos. 1997. “The tyranny of light,” Futures 29(9): 827–843.
For an analysis of object metaphors for absence and presence, see Law, John, and Annemarie Mol. 2001. “Situating technoscience: an inquiry into spatiality’s,” Environment and Planning D 19: 609–621.
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© 2015 Brian Rappert
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Rappert, B. (2015). Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn’t There in the Study of Science and Security. In: Sensing Absence: How to See What Isn’t There in the Study of Science and Security. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-59261-3_1
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