![]()
Chapter 1
Introduction
What does it mean today that unexpected events and crises are opportunities for change in the current “regimes of ignorance” (Dilley and Kirsch, 2015)? How does ignorance change in the context of proliferating unexpected events and crises? And why do recent crises fail to bring about meaningful change with regard to ignorance, and why do they instead enhance the mechanisms of strategic and epistemic ignorance?
With this book we contribute to the study of change of ignorance by drawing attention to forms of projective knowledge that are triggered in the context of unexpected events and crises. We discuss the manner in which projections, expectations, and political and cultural imaginaries that are concerned with how crises and change are supposed to unfold impact on ignorance. We show how ignorance is intrinsically entangled with these forms of knowledge because it facilitates the projection of possible futures. At the same time the projection and anticipation of how the crises should unfold allow for the politics of ignorance to evolve. Nowhere are these “projective” (Mische, 2009, 2014) and “anticipatory forms of knowledge” (Mallard and McGoey, 2018) more visible than in the European refugee crisis. The future scenarios of its development simultaneously casted the projections and expectations of what changes in the asylum policy are possible, preferable, and permissible to be brought into existence. We document these processes by employing an interactional approach. We focus on the interaction between projection and ignorance in Hungary, Poland, and Romania. This allows us to see how the dynamics of the processes in these countries are caught between the European refugee crisis as an EU phenomenon, on the one hand, and the stakes of domestic politics and attempts of autonomization, on the other hand.
In this book, we engage in a conversation with the proliferating ignorance studies (Gross and McGoey, 2015a) by advancing the point that we should focus on what ignorance does rather than on what ignorance is. So far, ignorance studies have made an impressive impact in terms of categorizing types of ignorance and building taxonomies. We contribute to this line of study by proposing to move to the next phase: the analysis of the interaction between ignorance and related forms of knowledge, projection in particular. The change of ignorance is not a story about ignorance solely but one about the interaction between ignorance and processes such as projection, expectation, and contestation. The study of change of ignorance thus entails us looking into how the forms of projective, anticipatory, and contestatory knowledge are involved in this process of change. We show that projection and ignorance interact in the context of contemporary crises. Such events translate into moments of elaboration of projections and of reification of new futures. In the context of unexpected events and crises, certain projections are institutionalized, while others are silenced, ignored, and marginalized.
Let us start with the first question we addressed at the beginning of our work: What does it mean today that the unexpected events and crises are an opportunity for change in the current regimes of ignorance? Ignorance emerges as a decisive component of contemporary unexpected events and crises. Much is heard today about tensions that come out of the shadows or about problems and crises that were not initially recognized as pressing but which now cannot be ignored any longer. Consider the following examples: growing income inequality, critical issues in global health, climate change, migrant crises, challenges posed by shifts in the ethical valuation of human-animal relations, clashes between religious and secular worldviews, the rise of surveillance technologies, and the securitization of the state. All these illustrations indicate that the inability to block, mute, or ignore long-term social problems that were not solved effectively, or which are unsolvable, is more than rhetoric accompanying the risk and uncertainty in society. Actors (individual and organizational) are increasingly facing situations when they have to urgently deal with intractable problems that became pressing and cannot be ignored any longer.
Still, if there is anything encouraging about the unexpected events or crises of contemporary society, it is the fact that these are opportunities for change. The unexpected events and crises occur as sequences of revelation of ignorance and acknowledging the unknown (Gross, 2010, p. 149). They open a window of opportunity (Kingdon, 2010) to trigger change in terms of producing new evidence, learning, awareness raising, and even advancing policy change. The assumption of unexpected events and crises as being partially caused by change as well as functioning as a window of opportunity to bring change in regimes of ignorance is quite prevalent. It is also something that the currently flourishing ignorance studies are well aware of, and take analytical pride in making explicit, either in the direction of indicating that such an encounter with ignorance takes place and change can be effected or towards indicating that a change of ignorance, although warranted and possibly haven taken place, did not actually materialize after all.
Now we move on to the second question: How does ignorance change in the context of proliferating unexpected events and crises? The problems that cannot be ignored any longer are rarely those that social actors had been ignoring outright. Rather, they are issues that are complex and long-term but had been approached in a technocratic manner and tended to stay out of the spotlight for a considerable time. They were not publicly debated, but certain actors knew quite a lot about them. When some events start causing problems and eventually come out of the shadows, the possibility opens for moving beyond purely technocratic management and for promoting new solutions. At the same time, alongside acknowledging the opening up of the opportunities for change, ignorance studies recurrently point at instances of reproduction of ignorance in the aftermath of unexpected events and crises, especially in its strategic and epistemic dimensions. As evidenced by McGoey (2007, 2010), Davies and McGoey (2012), Mallard and McGoey (2018), ignorance facilitates the process by which, in the context of major failures or crises, the institutional conditions that led to failure in the first place are likely to be reproduced.
Recent events such as the global financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the refugee crisis of 2015–2016 have both been linked with such instances of reproduction of ignorance (see Davies and McGoey, 2012; Horolets et al., 2020). The financial crisis, for instance, revealed forms of ignorance in how the experts interpreted economic phenomena and related to these paradigms. The change of ignorance for these experts, the relevant literature indicates, took the form of acknowledging the need to move to new theoretical models. Yet several observers indicated critically, neglect on the part of economists of the dysfunctions and inner tensions in their performative models and the flaws in their manner of applying knowledge remained unchallenged. In the language of ignorance studies, the strategic and epistemic facets of ignorance persisted. In a similar vein, the more recent European refugee crisis was linked to the overflow of vulnerabilities of the European Union asylum system. Still, several observers made the point, even though the fragility of the common asylum policy could not be ignored any longer as a result of the crisis, the ignorance of the important aspects of the refugee problem (human rights violations by some of the asylum policies, etc.) seems to reproduce, though in another form and with other issues at stake.
This leads us to the third question: Why do the contemporary crises fail to trigger meaningful change in the regimes of ignorance while enhancing the mechanisms of strategic and epistemic ignorance? Due to the rupture, incoherence, and temporary chaos they produce, unexpected events and crises are almost naturally considered as opportunities for change. Such framing creates expectations that a radical and visible reconfiguration of the social world and power relations will surface in the context of contemporary crises. The change is expected not only to be big but also quite meaningful, radical, and quick. Such projections and expectations of change create an atmosphere in which in spite of, or perhaps due to the prospective enthusiasm and impatience with said change, the dynamics of transformation in all its complexity (Scholten, 2020) might be missed, or when what is perceived is mainly continuity (Grabel, 2018). In other words, we find ourselves in the context emblematically depicted by Hirschman (1971, p. 330; see Grabel, 2018, p. 42) as having a “special difficulty and reluctance to concede change except when it simply can no longer be denied.” In this book, we deepen the understanding of the contemporary manifestations of this tendency by underlining how they are related to the projections and expectations of change that are nurtured by defining any event as surprising, unexpected, or critical.
Scope of the book
-
The view of unexpected events and crises as windows of opportunity for change in the regimes of ignorance is a quite prevalent one, with undeniable potential for emancipation of social actors, which gives value to critical thinking. In this book, our aim is not as much to deconstruct this linkage but to take it under discussion, and indicate phenomena taking place in the social sciences in relation to the manner in which we perceive unexpected events and crises. To give one example, in ignorance studies, the window of opportunity standpoint is influenced by the close connection between the study of ignorance and unexpected events and crises. The latter constitute an essential component of contemporary ignorance research, which to a considerable extent is empirically built on surprises and disruptive occurrences. These, we underline, are different from risks and unintended consequences typically taken as empirical cases by earlier paradigms in social sciences, for instance. The fact that ignorance studies speak about the unexpected (Portes, 2000), and not about the unintended (Mica, 2018) or risk society (Beck, 1992, 1999), confers this field certain privileges. Ignorance, surely, is rendered more visible. One sees more clearly how the encounter with and realization of ignorance subsequent to unexpected events or crises unfolds. At the same time, the focus on unexpected events and crises renders ignorance studies subject to certain vulnerabilities.
One of the aims of this book is to make more explicit that there is a kind of symbiosis between ignorance studies and the research sites this field embraces because of the so-called revelation of ignorance often discussed in such studies. We live today in a society of unexpected events and crises, rather than one of unintended consequences and risks. This plays well with the analytical and research needs of ignorance studies because it opens a venue wherein a variety of mechanisms of ignorance are revealed and highlighted in all their splendour. Ignorance is being discovered, confronted and ultimately transformed. This relation and the analytical ramifications that it inevitably involves, we argue, should be articulated in ignorance studies more explicitly.
-
Another constitutive part of our argument is that the concept of the window of opportunity for change in the context of unexpected events and crises should be described more precisely in relation to ignorance. Besides creating certain projections and expectations of change, the formulation of a window of opportunity manifests distinctly in particular fields of knowledge production. To put it simply, it appears as if the window of opportunity is tantamount to a distribution of roles in the process of change. The media, for instance, are more frequently linked with the opportunity to raise awareness. Public policy – with the opportunity for policy change. Politics – with the opportunity for new agenda setting. Academic research – with the opportunity to produce new and critical knowledge.
We suggest that the problem of change of ignorance should be sensitive to the differentiation in the distribution of opportunities across the fields of knowledge production. The overall change of ignorance materializes slower or faster depending on how these opportunities are framed, invested in, and supported with resources. The forms of knowledge elicited by the unexpected events and crises vary, too. Academic research, for instance, is expected to produce new evidence as well as contestation and critical thinking. Media, in their turn, are supposed to engage in framing and produce forms of legitimization for the narrative coming from the field of politics, while public policy is thought of as a source of policy framing and is expected to be involved in policy learning.
These forms of knowledge allow the overall change of ignorance to emerge. At the same time, they set the change of ignorance on a certain treadmill, so to speak, and create certain projections and expectations in this regard. As a formula, opportunity for change is concerned not only with the potential for change but also with the forms of projective knowledge that emerge in relation to it. The forms of projective and anticipatory knowledge are triggered by the very nature of the unexpected events and crises, in the context of which the revelation of ignorance occurs. They have a performative and agentic potential in the sense of opening windows of opportunity to produce new evidence, to raise awareness, and to bring policy change in relation to learning and similar areas. Simultaneously, they provoke a certain impatience and contestation of the change which actually occurs. These forms of projective and anticipatory knowledge are simply too big, too ambitious, too impatient about change, and too ready to dismiss it.
Various authors are currently working on developing an analytical framework for exploring this phenomenon of the tendency to dismiss change in the context of unexpected events and crises. Taleb (2007), for instance, opens up our eyes to the phenomenon of the black swans which are retrospectively believed to be anticipatable. Grabel (2018) discusses the continuity thesis in relation with the global economic crisis of 2007–2008. Best (2019a, 2019b) explores so-called unfailures, or quiet failures – that is, failures that seemed to be big, large scale, and meaningful but which eventually may disappoint their observers. Finally, Scholten (2020) considers public policy that has the tendency to derail and which is quickly contested in terms of the reactions it triggers. All these authors observe the same phenomenon of dismissal of change. Their work is ground-breaking and it presupposes analytical intuitions embedded in distinct theoretical...
