Dying Bees and the Social Production of Ignorance

Abstract

This article utilizes the ongoing debates over the role of certain agricultural insecticides in causing Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD)—the phenomenon of accelerated bee die-offs in the United States and elsewhere—as an opportunity to contribute to the emerging literature on the social production of ignorance. In our effort to understand the social contexts that shape knowledge/nonknowledge production in this case, we develop the concept of epistemic form. Epistemic form is the suite of concepts, methods, measures, and interpretations that shapes the ways in which actors produce knowledge and ignorance in their professional/intellectual fields of practice. In the CCD controversy, we examine how the (historically influenced) privileging of certain epistemic forms intersects with the social dynamics of academic, regulatory, and corporate organizations to lead to the institutionalization of three interrelated and overlapping types of ignorance. We consider the effects of these types of ignorance on US regulatory policy and on the lives of different stakeholders.

Absences: Methodological Note about Nothing, in Particular

“…These focus on efforts by social movement and other civil society actors to identify and draw attention to areas of research that are ignored by the scientific and regulatory communities. This work draws empirical support from actors' descriptions of what science is "undone" and why that negligence is a problem, and on those same groups' efforts to get undone science done (Hess 2009;Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013). While this literature comes closer than others to studying absence in a more absolute sense, empirical analyses to date generally do not study undone science per se; rather, they study the social movement organizations, tactics, and discourses that identify undone science and target it as a political, social, or environmental problem.…”

Rediscovering the 1%: Economic Expertise and Inequality Knowledge

“…Normative ignorance refers to a subtler, and perhaps more pervasive, form of ignorance. Normative ignorance is generated by disciplinary norms, standard operating procedures, standards of evidence, and so on that dictate which claims are accepted as authoritative, and which claims are either rejected or never even advanced (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013). A related stream of research on "undone science" examines cases where social movement activists pressure experts to produce knowledge relevant to the movement's goals, but which would require experts to alter their standard practices or accept alternative kinds of evidence (Frickel et al 2010).…”

“…The first studies the intentional, strategic production of ignorance, often connected to the profit motive of large corporations who benefit from political inaction and thus from the appearance of scientific controversy (Proctor 1995, Oreskes andConway 2010). The second examines the unintentional or normative production of ignorance ("undone science"), often connected to social movement pressure to change disciplinary norms and thus alter the way science is done or expand the objects of scientific inquiry (Epstein 2007, Frickel et al 2010, Kleinman and Suryanarayanan 2013. The rediscovery of the 1% has much in common with the "undone science" tradition, as the failure to observe trends in top incomes resulted from the particular ways that economists' regimes of perceptibility excluded top incomes from view rather than a strategic attempt to obfuscate wealth at the very top.…”

Toward thick legitimacy: Creating a web of legitimacy for agroecology

“…In the case of bee colony collapse disorder, regulators in the US have tended to ignore the experiential and practical evidence of beekeepers regarding the possible role of pesticides in disrupting bee behavior. These data did not match the dominant technical template of toxicological knowledge, with its idiom of 'dose-response curves' and 'lethal doses' generated from animal tests in the laboratory (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan, 2013). As a result, regulators discounted the idea that low-dose exposures to neonicotinoid pesticides could be harmful to bees.…”