In “The Will-Not-To-Know: Prison Sexology and the Archive of Homosexuality in Colonial India,” Rovel Sequeira reinterprets early 20th-century colonial prisons as laboratories not only of sexual science but of ignorance production. The paper examines the role of agnotology in a suppressed scandal involving prison medical officers in Calcutta and the Andaman Islands, whose studies of same-sex practices among prisoners were censored by the colonial state. Labeled unscientific, these findings were barred from circulation even as they shaped prison discipline. This contradiction reveals a colonial will-to-ignorance: a refusal not only to generate knowledge but to allow its existence. Colonial sexology, rather than driven by a Foucauldian will-to-knowledge, operated through deliberate erasure. As focus shifted from anatomy to the surveillance of prisoner correspondence, knowledge was produced under intensified oversight and simultaneously disavowed. Ignorance became infrastructural, structuring sexual deviance as moral excess and legitimizing punitive isolation, while ensuring such knowledge remained hidden from public and scientific view.
Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte’s “Becoming A Crocodile: Brazilian Anti-Vaccine and Pro-Vaccine Memes During the COVID-19,” explores in Brazil’s pandemic media landscape. Amid staggering COVID-19 death tolls, President Jair Bolsonaro fostered a culture of denialism by downplaying the virus, spreading vaccine misinformation, withholding federal health funds, and calling COVID a “gripezinha.” Despite contracting the virus, Bolsonaro refused vaccination, later falsifying his vaccine card to enable international travel. Oliveira-Monte examines how this state-sponsored agnotology extended into digital culture through anti-vaccine memes that circulated widely on social media, reinforcing doubt and misinformation. These were met with counter-memes using satire and humor to expose Bolsonaro’s contradictions and encourage vaccination. By tracing this meme-based culture war, the paper shows how agnotology was both state policy and grassroots resistance battleground—mobilized to obscure science, but also to reassert it through digital critique and popular dissent.
In “Artificial Ignorance: Understanding the Role of AI in Modern Agnotology,” Amit Ray examines the deliberate opacity of Big Tech. Technology giants such as Google and Meta deploy secrecy to shield algorithms and data practices, often under the guise of trade protection and competitive advantage. These practices pose significant risks to individual privacy, democratic oversight, and ethical data use. Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has exacerbated this opacity through proprietary systems and inscrutable neural networks. While firms claim progress in transparency, most efforts amount to “open-washing,” masking closed, profit-driven operations as altruistic openness. The lack of meaningful regulation allows continued misuse, despite growing awareness of algorithmic bias and discrimination. The paper explores how open-source movements and independent research attempt to counterbalance Big Tech’s dominance, but these efforts often fall short against entrenched economic incentives. Ultimately, this analysis calls for robust regulation and genuinely open, accountable AI systems.
Together, these three studies reveal that agnotology is not simply the absence of knowledge, but a strategic, contingent, and often institutional practice of withholding, obscuring, or discrediting information. Through the lenses of empire, media, and machine, these works show how agnotology is by no means a new phenomenon but is historically persistent and evolving in form. In the colonial archive, ignorance was enforced through institutional censorship and the classification of knowledge as deviant. In the digital pandemic age, ignorance moved through memes, state disinformation, and satirical resistance. In the age of AI, ignorance is embedded in algorithmic architectures, proprietary systems, and the economic logics that sustain them.
What links all three is the recognition that ignorance is not neutral. It is a political artifact shaped by institutions past and present—whether imperial, governmental, or corporate—often in service of control. Yet, each study also opens space for critique, resistance, and the reassertion of alternative epistemologies. The struggle over knowledge is ongoing and alive. In mapping these sites—colonial, viral, and computational—this synthesis calls for a broader awareness of how agnotology functions in our world, and more importantly, how it might be dismantled. Confronting the infrastructures of ignorance requires not only better transparency and regulation, but cultural strategies, historical awareness, and a commitment to epistemic justice that recognizes whose knowledge counts—and whose is erased.