5th ISA Forum of Sociology (6-11 July 2025)

Environmental Justice scholarship illuminates the various environmental injustices oppressed populations have had to endure, including high exposures to pollutants, land theft, diminished access to natural resources, impacts on those natural resources, and heightened exposure to the effects of climate change (such as increased vulnerability to rising temperatures and sea levels). This session endeavours to build on that scholarship by exploring how such injustices are undergirded by the production of ignorance.

The production of ignorance scholarship provides numerous relevant insights. First, the scholarship specifies that ignorance is not simply a void to be filled with knowledge, but rather can be a strategic resource for those in power, as it helps obscure knowledge that is inconvenient to political agendas. Second, it illuminates that ignorance does not just happen, but rather is actively manufactured by those in power as a means of stifling dissent and opposition. Third, the scholarship elucidates numerous mechanisms through which the powerful produce and perpetuate ignorance, such as stifling the production of inconvenient knowledge, suppressing uncomfortable knowledge, and neutralising uncomfortable by omission, distraction, denial, and downplaying.

We welcome papers on a range of topics, including, but not limited to, explorations of how: 1) corporations, state agencies, or other powerful institutions manufacture and/or perpetuate ignorance that enables environmental injustices; 2) colonialism has alienated indigenous populations from their own knowledge systems; and 3) university curricula systematically obscure systems of domination that produce environmental injustices.