The Urgency and Benefits of Decentering and Decentralizing Knowledge Production: Knowledge from the Margins and the Social Studies of Ignorance Open Access
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Published:June 2025
Daniel Lee Kleinman, 2025. "The Urgency and Benefits of Decentering and Decentralizing Knowledge Production: Knowledge from the Margins and the Social Studies of Ignorance", Decentralizing Knowledges: Essays on Distributed Agency, Leandro Rodriguez Medina, Sandra Harding
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This chapter considers the relationship between decentered and decentralized knowledge production and the simultaneous production of ignorance. It begins by underlining the definitions of decentering and decentralization that Rodriguez Medina and Harding use and tie these terms to recent episodes that can be aptly characterized using them. It then highlights important ways in which ignorance has been conceptualized in science and technology studies and allied fields. From there, the chapter uses several significant cases to make the argument that the failure to seriously engage decentered and decentralized knowledge production can lead to prominent spheres of ignorance. It suggests that creating space for decentered and decentralized knowledge production can make more robust knowledge possible than would otherwise be the case.