9th Annual International Conference 

9 - 11 October 2023 | South Africa

Wits Centre for Diversity Studies

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

Usually, 'ignorance' is perceived as the absence of knowledge, unconscious and nonpurposive. A more critical understanding sees ignorance as a social and epistemic achievement that is systemically deployed in the interests of certain groups or people. Ignorance operates in human relations, culture and organizations as "a pervasive and fundamental influence in human cognition, emotion, action, social relations and culture" (Smithson 2008, p. 159). People positioned differently by virtue of social structures know different things and are kept ignorant in different ways, and their intellectual, emotional and psychic lives are therefore shaped differently. Structures and epistemologies may maintain non-knowing and facilitate processes whereby what was once known is forgotten, or what could be known is repressed. Within such social conditions ignorant subjectivities are formed.

Ignorance is therefore profoundly political and engages practices to install and maintain not-knowing and to hide where and how systemic ignorance is being constructed or maintained, and whose interests are served by such not knowing. When we engage with issues of diversity, the management of ignorance plays an important role in keeping patterns of advantage and disadvantage in place, in legitimizing marginalization, violence and exploitation and in keeping dominant worldviews in place. Exposing the operations of ignorance is therefore often an important act of resistance and restitution, of refusing to forget, struggling to remember, and of restoring knowledge, ways of knowing and knowers that have been devalued and delegitimised (Smithson, 2008). It is also integral to refusing processes by which past injustices may be buried by beneficiaries of past injustices to avoid necessary social reconstruction and accountability.

We invite abstracts for our conference to be held both in person and virtually at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.