Instrumental ignorance Questioning scientific ecologies of existential non-knowledge in green tech innovation, sustainability research, renewable energy development, and the human expansionist episteme

This research explores critical innovative roles for conceptual assumptions, institutional amnesia, practiced self-deceit, material avoidance, dissembling, undone science, and other forms of applied ignorance. Ignorance is often conceptualized as a gap in technical expertise; however, ignorance may also arise through technical expertise and prove instrumental for scientific, technical, and finance experts. Specialists and organizations can draw upon ignorance to protect their symbolic values from material evidence that might otherwise challenge those values. Sharing ignorance through science journalism, academic publishing, and government communications relies on carefully crafted language that unknowledgeable actors would be unable to orchestrate. This dissertation considers instrumental roles of ignorance in the development of solar cells, wind turbines, hydrogen infrastructure, bioenergy, electric vehicles, and other green tech innovations.
The project proposes an extension of the sociological concept of expert non-knowledge to include a class or an age that shares an encumbering worldview. Clean energy innovation may constitute a seductive anticipatory knowledge framework that draws from an unorganized ecology of ignorance, manifesting consciously, subconsciously, or some combination thereof. The resulting spectacles can protect us from forbidden questions about our expanding presence and culpability in ecological decline. This work draws upon agnotology, not to create competing truth claims, but rather to provisionally consider challenging questions in an attempt to triangulate what is left unknown, to ask why, and to consider inquiring differently in the future. In short, the product of this method is not better answers, but different questions.