Border Agnotologies: Power, Technology, Resistance

The introduction to the Special Issue on Border agnotologies outlines the contributions that the articles gathered here make to the vibrant interdisciplinary conversation between critical scholarship on borders, migration and (in)security, and the field of ignorance studies. By focusing on borders, we have invited authors to explore the specificities of bordering practices in the production and reproduction of knowledge and non-knowledge. Through the plural agnotologies, we propose to pluralise the vocabularies of ignorance and non-knowledge by unpacking the practices that produce not-knowing. The Special Issue attends to heterogeneous forms of not-knowing in bordering practices, unpacks processes of knowledge and non-knowledge production, traces how non-knowledge is entangled with power relations, and how it enacts subjectivities. As bordering practices multiply forms of exclusion and produce ‘differential inclusion’ at the same time, we need to understand how these multiplications and hierarchies are sustained through non-knowledge and not just knowledge, how analyses of non-knowledge can reconfigure modes of critique, and how they can enable political contestation, refusal and resistance.