Introduction – Unknowing geographies: Situating ignorance,inattention and inscrutability

Abstract

This article introduces a special issue entitled ‘Unknowing Geographies: Situating Ignorance, Inattention and Inscrutability’ which aims to catalyse a community of critically engaged ‘unknowing geographies’ scholarship. The special issue assembles research which combines ignorance studies scholarship’s observation that ignorance is constituted through active processes of unknowing that are inextricably entangled with knowledge practices with a geographical attentiveness to the spatialities and temporalities of knowledge production. It argues that this approach enables scholars to apprehend (un)knowing as a process which is inescapably geographically situated and thus to trace the ways in which it becomes embroiled in the ordering of space, time and mobility through its encounters with political projects, commercial interests, epistemic conventions and/or socio-cultural imaginaries. This means that geographical theories, concepts and methods are especially well-placed to enrich existing analyses of the organisation and implications of (un)knowing but also that it is important for geography as a discipline to consider the role of its own knowledge practices in constituting, configuring and distributing ignorance. The article focuses readers’ attention on different dimensions of unknowing geographies through exploring how the contributors to this special issue examine the shaping of inattention to particular scales, places and circulations; the generation of inscrutable time-spaces; and the ways that the forms of geographical ignorance which they occasion intervene in the ordering of political, urban and environmental geographies.

Introducing unknowing geographies

We are writing as members of the UK climate research community to urge you to challenge robustly the President of the United States, Donald Trump, about his reckless approach to climate change, during his forthcoming State Visit to the United Kingdom. (. . .) Mr Trump’s administration has been purging information about climate change from Government websites, stopping climate research, and denying the scientific evidence provided by the world’s best scientists. Its actions promote ignorance and denial (. . .) which is damaging the best interests of current and future generations in this country. (Adamson et al., 2025: 1)

In September 2025, 175 prominent climate change researchers, many of them geographers, sent an open letter to British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. They urged him to challenge the current US government’s climate change policies during President Donald Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom. That geographers would be heavily represented among the signatories to a letter of this nature is perhaps unsurprising. However, the letter’s allegation that the second Trump administration is actively engaged in promoting ignorance about climate change – and its foregrounding of this process as a matter of concern worthy of enumeration alongside the recent withdrawal of the United States from the Paris climate change agreement – appears noteworthy. That opposition to the official production of climate ignorance would animate such a broad swathe of geographers, from atmospheric scientists to energy policy specialists and environmental humanities scholars, is significant for two reasons. First, it signals not only the growing significance of agnogenetic (ignorance-creating) activities in shaping public policy and political debate (see Hess, 2020; Simon, 2022), but also their increasingly direct collision with many of geography’s most central objects and practices of knowledge production – from climate science to gender studies research and the mapping of environmental and health inequalities. Second, it suggests that a concern with the ways in which states of unknowing are generated, ordered and (sometimes) utilised strategically to configure contemporary political, economic, socio-cultural and environmental formations now spans subdisciplinary boundaries and might spark the creation of novel communities of geographical thought, enquiry and research practice. Now more than ever, it would seem, geographers can ill afford to be inattentive to ignorance.

This special issue is intended to provide a meeting place around which geographers who share a concern with the spatialities and temporalities of unknowing, the ways in which they intervene in the constitution and ordering of contemporary geographies, and their implications for the politics of geographical knowledge production might begin to convene. Drawing together contributions from urban, political and environmental geographers engaged with questions and processes of unknowing, while also looking outwards to cognate disciplines, it seeks to illustrate how a range of geographical concepts and methodological tools might enrich the study of ignorance and unknowing. In this way, the special issue aims to encourage closer dialogue between geographical scholarship and the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies research. Although this literature is internally heterogeneous, embracing varied intellectual and methodological orientations (Fernandez Pinto, 2015, 2017), ignorance studies researchers tend to proceed from the proposition that ignorance is neither the absence of knowledge nor its antagonistic opposite. Instead, most consider ignorance to be the constitutive companion of knowledge (Gross, 2010; Murphy, 2006; Tuana, 2004), arguing that because the generation of knowledge typically disturbs settled understandings of the world and raises novel questions: ‘the unknown is not diminished by new discoveries. Quite the contrary: the realm of the unknown is magnified’ (Gross and McGoey, 2015: 1).

This seemingly simple claim has turned out to hold profound implications. In arguing that the generation of knowledge necessarily also precipitates novel forms of ignorance (Gross, 2007, 2010, 2016), ignorance studies scholars have positioned unknowing as a state which must be made as actively (and sometimes as painstakingly) as the knowledge gained through meticulous research or sustained apprenticeship within a community of skilled practitioners (McGoey, 2007, 2012; Tuana, 2004). For such scholars, ignorance is therefore inescapably the product of processes of (un)knowing (McGoey, 2019). ¹ In thus positing that knowledge and ignorance are co-constituted, such scholars have embedded processes of unknowing within practices of knowledge production, which several decades of science studies research have argued are thoroughly social (as well as entirely material) in character (for instance, Haraway, 1988; Latour and Woolgar, 1979; Powell, 2007; Shapin, 1998). In consequence, ignorance studies approaches unknowing as a socially, culturally, historically and politically situated phenomenon – one moulded and marked indelibly by its origins within specific divisions of labour and conventions of credibility, whose uneven distribution reflects the networks of communication and interaction within which it circulates, and whose effects are mediated by social inequalities and political hierarchies. Indeed, this social patterning of (un)knowing is rarely more evident than when the knowledges of impoverished, racialised or otherwise marginalised and othered persons and groups are structurally denied cultural and institutional recognition, resulting in derogatory ascriptions of ignorance to them by their presumed social superiors (Gross and McGoey, 2015; Mills, 2007; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007).

Importantly, this means that much ignorance studies research regards the production of ignorance through practices of unknowing not as intrinsically nefarious or malevolent but as a pervasive feature of social life whose moral and political valence is contingent and variable (see Fernandez Pinto 2015, 2017 for an overview of debates on this point). Accordingly, they have produced numerous studies examining how this potentially powerful phenomenon may emerge inadvertently from prevailing orderings of knowledge, how it can be cultivated actively and employed strategically in pursuit of a varied range of economic, political or cultural objectives, and how its exercise might transform the social world (Birkenholtz and Simon, 2022). Ignorance studies research often traces how ignorance can be cultivated to avoid culpability for the environmental and health harms caused by commercial or military activities (e.g. Brice et al., 2020; Gould and Stel, 2022; McGoey, 2007, 2009; Rappert, 2012; Waters, 2019) or how accusations of ignorance may reinforce social hierarchies (Mills, 2007; Sullivan and Tuana, 2007). However, it has also highlighted unknowing’s more positive and productive potentials. For instance, it has demonstrated the importance of a reflexive awareness of the unknown in calling forth new knowledge production (Gross, 2010, 2016) and highlighted Ugandan HIV clinics’ employment of selective ignorance to prevent US donors committed to abstinence-based HIV prevention approaches from learning of their safe sex promotion activities (Heimer, 2012).

Geography has a rich history of internal reflection both on the limitations and constitutive omissions of its own disciplinary knowledge practices and on the role played by the ‘lure’ of the unknown in motivating and shaping geographical research activities from scientific expeditions to mapmaking (e.g. Gregory, 1998; Van Schendel, 2002; Wright, 1947). However, geographers have until recently occupied a somewhat marginal position within most strands of ignorance studies scholarship. Indeed, while the first field-defining handbook of ignorance studies scholarship contained an excellent chapter on geographies of ignorance (Frickel and Kinchy, 2015), it was written by two science studies scholars and made few references to research by geographers into the spatialities or temporalities of unknowing. During the decade since its publication, growing numbers of geographers have employed ignorance studies concepts to explore how processes of unknowing both take shape through engagement with specific spaces and participate pervasively in configuring contemporary environmental, political, cultural and economic geographies. For instance, Scheel and Ustek-Spilda (2019) illustrate how policymakers’ attachment to statistical techniques configured around the territorial boundaries of nation-states and individual homes impedes the emergence of knowledge about international migration, while Marquardt (2016) interrogates their role in obscuring the structural causes of homelessness. Meanwhile, Blakey (2021) examines how greenhouse gas accounting methodologies’ overlooking of transnational emissions sources shields the aviation sector from the impacts of changing environmental policies. By contrast, Nishiyama (2022, 2024) has employed historical geographical approaches to surface the selective forgetting of past civilian inhabitation of lands requisitioned for military use and to critique its role in legitimating contemporary colonial geopolitical orderings premised on the extraterritorial projection of force. Nevertheless, it is only in the past few years that individual geographers’ engagements with ignorance studies debates and concerns have crystallised into more programmatic efforts to distil geographically informed typologies of unknowing (Birkenholtz and Simon, 2022; Simon, 2022) or into sustained methodological reflection upon the problems and possibilities of studying ignorance production geographically (Brice, 2023; Dev et al., 2022). As late as 2022, Kroepsch and Clifford (2022: 172) could still observe that: ‘a robust geographic literature on the production of environmental knowledge was readily available (. . .) but geographic scholarship on the inverse – environmental not-knowing – was more difficult to come by’.

This special issue builds upon existing geographical engagements with ignorance studies research through situating critical engagement with the politics, ethics and economies of ignorance within modes of enquiry that attend to the diverse spatialities and temporalities of unknowing. Its constituent articles examine where and how ignorance is generated, the arrangements which circulate (or immobilise) non-knowledge and the ways in which processes of unknowing order ecologies, imaginaries, urban spaces and geopolitical territories. In doing so, they outline some of the varied geographies of unknowing which underlie politically and ethically charged processes from the overlooking of environmental harms to the rescaling of urban governance and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Examining how and why certain spaces are rendered unknowable, some histories are forgotten and particular futures go unanticipated, the articles in this special issue interweave theoretical examination of the epistemologies of (un)knowing with empirical engagement with a range of pressing public issues. The following section frames and orientates this special issue collection. It expands on ignorance studies scholarship’s attention to the socio-political situatedness of ignorance by arguing that processes of unknowing are, like the knowledge practices with which they are constitutively entangled, necessarily bound up with particular sites, spaces and temporalities. Returning to the Trump administration’s ongoing assault on climate science, it argues that such agnogenetic interventions are therefore inescapably geographical phenomena and that attending to their spatiotemporal characteristics and effects can help to specify what is at stake in such modes of unknowing. The remaining sections then outline the contours of an ‘unknowing geographies’ scholarship which facilitates enquiry into the spatiotemporal dimensions of unknowing through attending to inattention, inscrutability and ignorance. Each section illustrates one of these moves through introducing the papers from this collection which engage most directly with it. The article concludes by calling for greater critical reflection on the role played by geography’s own practices of (non-)knowledge production in the generation and circulation of ignorance.

Situating unknowing

What might it mean to take an unknowing geographies approach to the ignorance-producing activities with which so many geographers presently find themselves concerned? Returning briefly to the second Trump administration’s attempts to defund, deplatform and discredit climate science research provides an opportunity to illustrate several important dimensions of such a perspective. Since President Trump’s return to office in January 2025, the US Federal Government has subjected the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to repeated rounds of compulsory staff layoffs, reducing the agency’s total workforce by around 7.5%. In April 2025, it also released a proposed NOAA budget for 2026–2027 which imposed a 27% funding cut upon the agency, targeted with the express intent to ‘eliminates functions of the Department that are misaligned with the President’s agenda and the expressed will of the American people. This includes (. . .) significant reductions to education, grants, research, and climate-related programs within NOAA’ (Office of Management and Budget, 2025: 1). This proposed budget notably allocated a budget and a staff headcount of 0 to the NOAA’s Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research (OAR), which houses many of its climate research programmes (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2025). The ensuing months have witnessed further federal cuts to US government-funded environmental research organisations, projects and programmes. These include the retirement of the NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, and (perhaps most resonantly) the termination of federal funding for its storied Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory – the source of the world’s longest-running continuous data series for atmospheric CO₂ concentration measurements (Yoder, 2025).

These initiatives extend long-established repertoires of climate change denial in important ways. Political and commercial interests opposed to the decarbonisation of energy systems have long sought to sow public doubt about the science of climate change – whether through attacking the credibility of prominent scientists and research centres, funding contrarian scholars who dispute their findings or lobbying for the suppression of published research (Dunlap and McCright, 2011; Jacques et al., 2008; McCright and Dunlap, 2010). Indeed, several classic works within the ‘agnotology’ school of ignorance studies have analysed these tactics of uncertainty production, along with related methods employed by the tobacco industry, to illustrate their argument that ignorance is generated actively through disrupting or preventing the production and circulation of knowledge (Fernandez Pinto, 2015; Oreskes and Conway, 2012; Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008). The first Trump administration utilised many of these tactics frequently – notably the concealment or destruction of formerly public environmental and climate datasets and reports (Dillon et al., 2017) – and the second continues to employ them liberally. However, they are now augmented by a sustained drive to forestall the production of politically inconvenient knowledge about atmospheric, marine and climatic processes through the targeted removal of institutional and financial support for climate science research. Longstanding efforts to withhold, discredit or disqualify research demonstrating a link between greenhouse gas emissions and changes in the earth’s atmosphere and climate are thus joined by concerted attempts to render it impossible to determine whether such climatic changes are occurring at all or to establish their magnitude and impacts.

Media coverage is often unequivocal in depicting these measures as ‘the Trump administration (. . .) making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing’ (Yoder, 2025). However, what is more interesting is that the interventions through which these efforts attempt to render atmospheric and climatic change unknowable are highly geographically specific and that the forms of ignorance which they generate display distinctive (if complex) spatialities and temporalities. Although the Trump Administration’s initial programme of staffing cuts at agencies such as the NOAA was rather indiscriminate subsequent rounds of funding and personnel reduction have been targeted more carefully at organisational units, such as the OAR, which research changes in atmospheric and oceanic systems at global scales and over long time periods. For instance, the resources of the National Weather Service – with its focus on forecasting relatively short-term, small-scale and (sometimes) immediately economically costly atmospheric processes – have actually been increased somewhat by the transfer of some former OAR research programmes to its stewardship (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 2025). The defunding of the Mauna Loa Atmospheric Observatory would appear to exemplify this attempt to occlude large-scale and long-term processes of atmospheric change. On one hand, it threatens to eliminate an iconic climate science ‘truth-spot’ (Gieryn, 2006, 2018) where Charles David Keeling carried out the measurements which he used in 1961 to demonstrate for the first time that atmospheric CO2 concentrations were increasing (Oreskes and Conway, 2012). On the other it promises, through interrupting the world’s longest-running continuous atmospheric greenhouse gas dataset, to make it more difficult for future climate researchers to show that these changes in atmospheric composition are continuing.

In short, the second Trump administration appears to be selectively withdrawing support for atmospheric research at particular spatial and temporal scales in ways which might be expected to occasion a selective scientific inattention to global-scale atmospheric processes and long-term climatic change. Should these resourcing cuts be implemented, the effect over time might be to render the state of global atmospheric and oceanic systems (and especially changes in their processes and functioning) increasingly difficult to measure and to represent precisely or credibly. In the process, these systems might be converted into what Kroepsch and Clifford (2022: 172) call ‘inscrutable’ spaces and circulations: ‘a space that is made difficult to know by an interplay of biophysical, epistemic, and political economic factors, and whose unintelligibility poses serious consequences for environmental politics and everyday life’.

This rather binary account of the Trump administration’s climate science policies as attempting to induce a scalar distribution of ignorance – which renders large-scale and long-term climatic processes inscrutable while smaller and faster scales of atmospheric change such as weather systems remain knowable and legible – is satisfyingly neat. However, it does not fully account for acts such as the discontinuation of the NOAA’s Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database. Until updates to this dataset ceased in early 2025, it recorded and mapped extreme weather events estimated to have caused direct property damage and indirect economic disruption costing over US$1 billion in current currency values. It thus enabled the generation of knowledge about the financial impacts of and risks posed by short-term weather events at the relatively granular scale of individual US states and counties (National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), 2025). However, it also recorded (and its webpage still prominently highlights) consistent increases in the frequency of these events over the decades since its data series began in 1980 – with Trump administration officials reported to have expressed concern that ‘This data is often used to advance the narrative that climate change is making disasters more frequent, more extreme, and more costly’ (Bush, 2025). Other sources speculate that the administration had feared that the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database might be used in future climate impact attribution research to link extreme weather events to human-induced climate change, and thus to provide evidentiary support for legal action against large greenhouse gas emitters such as fossil fuel companies (Freedman, 2025).

If this is so, then the archiving of this database may have been an attempt to impede the production of knowledge about relationships between long-term climate system changes and fleeting but destructive weather events which inflict financial costs and hardships on specific people, places and organisations. Through ensuring that knowledges about these different atmospheric scales and spaces remain decoupled from one another, the Trump administration might be endeavouring to prolong current patterns of fossil fuel investment and production through removing the threat of costly future litigation. The retirement of the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database would then emerge as an effort to cultivate strategic ignorance (Brice et al., 2020; McGoey, 2007, 2012) – defined as an active effort to ‘mobilize, manufacture or exploit unknowns in a wider environment to avoid liability for earlier actions’ (McGoey, 2019: 3) – about the impacts of climate change. It would also constitute a politically consequential intervention into the shaping of future economic geographies of fossil fuel production with the potential to impact materially and dangerously upon future physical and ecological transformations.

This brief exposition is intended to illustrate both that processes of unknowing operate through intervention into geographically specific and situated knowledge practices – a situatedness which endows the ignorance that they produce with characteristic spatialities and temporalities – and that this geographical character often informs the political, economic and socio-cultural uses to which that ignorance is put. Indeed, that processes of unknowing would be situated spatially and temporally as well as socially should come as no surprise. Geographers of knowledge (notably including geographers of science) have long emphasised that knowledge-generating practices are bound to particular places and evince distinctive spatialities by virtue of both their material organisation and their embedding within historically and culturally specific classifications of space (Powell, 2007). Knowledges, even and perhaps especially those which aspire to a placeless and timeless universality, are thus inescapably geographical things (Naylor, 2005; Shapin, 1998). Extensive geographical scholarship has thus examined how the material characteristics, geographical location and/or narrative portrayal of ‘truth-spots’ (Gieryn, 2006, 2018) – respected sites of knowledge production such as famous laboratories – impart a patina of credibility to the claims which they produce (Greenhough, 2006). It has explored how field research sites are employed to domesticate supposedly placeless truth-claims to the rigours and requirements of new environments and communities of practice (Henke, 2000). Geographers have also mapped the networks of intellectual, professional and social relationships through which knowledges circulate, highlighting their capacity to distribute truth-claims and knowledge practices unevenly between different social groups and thereby to create parallel epistemic communities (Livingstone, 2003; Mahony and Hulme, 2018). So, if knowledge and ignorance are indeed constituted together and interdependently within entangled relations and practices of (un)knowing (Gross, 2010; Gross and McGoey, 2015), then this necessarily implies that ignorance is as intrinsically geographical a phenomenon as knowledge (Frickel and Kinchy, 2015).

Indeed, a growing body of research produced by geographers and ignorance studies scholars alike highlights how prevailing geographies of knowledge can also generate particular spatialities, circulations and distributions of ignorance. Tuana (2004) illustrates both how the male-dominated spaces of postwar medical research produced ignorance about the intimate anatomy of female sexual pleasure alongside physiological knowledge and how the knowledge produced by the women’s health movement in its efforts to address these medical ‘blind spots’ was often disqualified and dismissed due to its origins in domestic spaces. More prosaically, scholars have shown how the distribution of information across distant repositories, incompatible media or disconnected groups of people may prevent it from being assembled to render phenomena or patterns which overflow the boundaries of localised networks or communities perceptible and knowable (Heimer, 2012; Kinchy, 2020; Lange, 2016; Parsons, 2022). For instance, commercial confidentiality concerns (Freidberg, 2017) and anxieties about being held accountable for environmental, employment or product safety infringements committed by others (Brice et al., 2020) may restrict information sharing among the firms which make up a transnational supply chain sufficiently to render all parties ignorant of the provenance of their products.

This special issue builds upon existing work across both geography and ignorance studies which attends to the spatiotemporal situatedness of processes of unknowing and of the forms of ignorance to which they give rise. It identifies three modes or moments of unknowing which might help to orientate researchers’ attention to the making of such uneven geographies of ignorance and to sensitise us to the roles that they play in shaping contemporary environmental, social and political circulations and formations. Inattention to particular scales, spaces, places or mobilities may result in the non-production of knowledge about their inhabitants, characteristics or processes. This may result in an inability to depict certain sites or objects and to render them legible within prevailing representational practices – notably the mapping of spatial or scientific data – in ways which render certain spaces and circulations inscrutable. Finally, the forms of geographical ignorance which emerge from these processes of inattention and of rendering-inscrutable may be mobilised within social and political projects to either reproduce or transform existing orderings of time and space. The remaining sections of this introductory article briefly introduce each of these three dimensions of unknowing geographies in turn and outline the ways in which the special issue’s constituent papers develop each theme.

Inattention

Inattention is a classic object of research within ignorance studies, and especially in research on ‘undone science’. This body of literature examines how the economic interests, political priorities and intellectual norms of influential social actors – notably institutional funders of scientific research – encourage enquiry into some fields and phenomena while signalling financially or symbolically that others are unworthy of investigation (Simon, 2022). Work in this vein argues that ‘ignorance (. . .) is socially produced through underlying changes in the political economy of the scientific field’ (Hess, 2015: 141). For scholars of undone science, the patterning of knowledge and ignorance therefore tends to reflect asymmetries of status and influence within society. The problems and curiosities of powerful actors are typically subjected to expansive and well-resourced examination, while those of subaltern groups are often ignored (Birkenholtz and Simon, 2022). Notably, this literature is replete with studies showing how research into environmental and health harms caused by profitable industrial processes and products, which might expose their manufacturers to the risk of costly litigation or more stringent regulation, is deprioritised by both government and private sector funders (Kleinman and Suryanarayanan, 2013; Oreskes and Conway, 2012; Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008). However, it also demonstrates that awareness of such domains of ignorance can rouse grassroots citizen science groups and civil society movements to produce counter-knowledges designed to expose and contest these harmful ‘blind spots’ (Hess, 2016, 2020; Kinchy, 2020).

A growing quantity of research within this literature examines how dominant scientific practices – and especially prevailing economies of research funding – systematically defund or discourage the collection of data from particular kinds of sites. In thus deflecting scientific scrutiny away from certain spaces and places, these processes of inattention forestall the production of scientific knowledge about them – a state of affairs that Kinchy et al (2016: 881) note ‘may constitute a form of social inequality if they make some groups of people less capable than others to respond to environmental threats’. Kinchy and colleagues show how US federal and state governments – which fund groundwater testing principally to ensure the safety of public drinking water supplies – have focused water quality research on urbanised areas whose residents rely largely on municipal water networks. This pattern of testing implicitly creates systematic scientific inattention to water quality in rural areas with greater reliance on private drinking water wells, making it difficult to ascertain whether groundwater supplies in rural areas experiencing shale gas extraction have been contaminated by fracking activities. Meanwhile, Frickel and Vincent (2007) show how a decision by regulatory authorities in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to distribute their soil contamination testing according to the severity of flooding rather than the historical locations of polluting industrial facilities produced ‘gaps’ in knowledge about the distribution of environmental hazards in New Orleans. Importantly, such studies often highlight how ignorance of environmental and social injustices arises from disjunctions between the spatial scales at which data are collected and aggregated and those at which the impacts of discriminatory policies or industrial development are experienced (Kinchy, 2020). As Kroepsch and Clifford (2022: 173) note, ‘certain objects and relationships are perceivable at some scales but not others’, meaning that observing or measuring at a particular scale or degree of resolution may render unknowable phenomena which require more granular scrutiny or overflow the spatial units which organise knowledge production (Allen, 2003; Parsons, 2022).

Anna Nikolaeva’s paper, ‘The politics of non-knowing, smart technology and just mobility transitions: A case study and research agenda’ extends the insights of such research by arguing that the ‘car-centric’ knowledge practices of transport researchers and planners occasion a systematic inattention to the mobilities and needs of urban cyclists. Mobilising Beck and Wehling’s (2012) politics of non-knowing framework, Nikolaeva explores a widespread contention among cycling activists that a dearth of data concerning urban cycling renders cyclists invisible and irrelevant within policymaking processes, and that intensified monitoring of and research into cycling is required to remedy this neglect. She therefore examines the ‘datafication’ of cycling through digital smart city technologies – revealing that this process not only produces such knowledge, but sometimes also obscures cycling mobilities ‘through omissions and exclusions, but also through sheer information overload and by producing irrelevant knowledge’ (Nikolaeva, 2025). In so doing, Nikolaeva discloses a more ambivalent picture of the role of cycling ‘data gaps’ in urban mobility politics than might be suggested by accounts of undone science which identify inattention with devaluation and disregard. For some activists and policymakers, official inattention to cycling does represent an epistemic injustice to be remedied which degrades cyclist safety through facilitating the deprioritisation of investment in cycling infrastructure. Others regard calls for intensified data production as a delaying tactic which is employed to defer such investment or even as a risk to the freedom and privacy conferred by cycling’s resistance to many standard techniques of monitoring and recording. Tracing these contestations through interviews with activists and policymakers in Dublin, Manchester, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, Nikolaeva positions controversies over which forms of knowledge about urban mobility should be generated and used to inform policy as being central to struggles over the transition towards just low-carbon mobility regimes. Her paper concludes by presenting an agenda for future scholarship, which calls for research into the politics of non-knowing to be extended to investigate how mobility-related ignorance is constructed beyond northern and western Europe, and to unpack how car-centrism and technocratic knowledge practices produce ignorance about (inequalities in) different groups’ mobilities across multiple modes of transportation.

Maud Chalmandrier and colleagues, meanwhile, explore how and why cities emerged as ‘blind spots’ within 20th-century ecological research in their article ‘Ecology’s inattention to the city: Exploring a regime of scientific imperceptibility’. In so doing, they go beyond urban ecologists’ frequent invocation of claims that ecological science was until recently inattentive to urban flora and fauna to call for further research into this under-studied field and thus consolidate their status as representatives of a novel scientific subdiscipline. Instead, they investigate why ecologists became inattentive to urban spaces in the first place. Drawing on Michelle Murphy’s (2006) concept of the regime of (im)perception, they seek to identify the epistemic framings, field research practices and modes of institutional marginalisation which ‘(re)produced the lack of attention to the city in the ecological sciences, and (. . .) kept relatively long-standing practices of ecological research in cities invisible and the research results confined to the fringes of both mainstream scientific discourse and institutions’ (Chalmandrier et al., 2025). Combining analysis of research publications both in international ecology journals and in the journals of local Swiss naturalist societies with life history interviews with Swiss ecological researchers working both within and outside universities, they move beyond the positioning of scientific inattention as a reflection of prevailing political–economic interests and scientific orthodoxies which organises much undone science research. Instead, Chalmandrier and colleagues argue that ecological scientists’ inattention to the city resulted from a contingent encounter between intellectual framings of ecology as the study of ‘natural’ habitats (which constructed cities as spaces uninteresting to ecologists) and field research practices organised at scales either larger or smaller than urban territories. Through preventing even field studies conducted within cities from standing as exemplars of a distinct category of urban ecological space, these ‘spatio-epistemic processes’ confined Swiss ecologists working on and within cities to the margins of the academic system. They therefore forestalled the emergence of a recognised community of Swiss urban ecologists. In so doing, Chalmandrier and colleagues show that this regime of imperceptibility ‘hindered the constitution of urban sites as meaningful places and objects for ecological science’ (Chalmandrier et al., 2025) – rendering cities inscrutable to ecological science and imperceptible to its practitioners.

Inscrutability

In illustrating how this regime of imperception rendered cities illegible to Swiss ecologists’ intellectual categories and resistant to their field methods, Chalmandrier and colleagues’ paper shows how inattention to certain places, mobilities and scales is often bound up with the rendering-inscrutable of particular spaces and circulations. A newly emerging body of work, geographies of inscrutability also build upon Murphy’s concept of the ‘regime of (im)perceptibility’. Murphy (2006: 7–8) defines a regime of (im)perception as an assemblage of ‘historically specific practices of truth-telling – laboratory techniques, instruments, methods of observing, modes of calculating, regimes of classification, and so on’, which renders some features of the world tangible, sensible and knowable while consigning others to imperceptibility. Murphy’s argument is that since phenomena must be accessible in order to be studied – it must be made possible to register their effects on other entities in order that knowledge about them may be produced – things and spaces which are rendered imperceptible by current knowledge practices are by extension also made unknowable. Kroepsch and Clifford (2022) expand productively upon this observation by suggesting that the modes of spatial and scalar inattention explored by the papers introduced above can also render certain spaces and places imperceptible within particular assemblages of knowledge practices. In so doing, they make the people and processes within them resistant to examination and thus ‘inscrutable’. Kroepsch & Clifford thus show how a constellation of biophysical, epistemic and political factors combine to render the circulation of dust through the air above the Colorado Plateau and of groundwater through the subsurface below it insensible and unknowable, constraining efforts both to campaign for improved air quality and to conserve water resources.

The papers within this special issue expand further upon the concept of inscrutability by refocusing attention on the role of analytical and representational techniques – and most prominently of cartographic practices – in mediating this rendering (im)perceptible of spaces. In so doing, they build upon science studies scholars’ analyses of the roles played by devices and practices of abstraction, calculation and inscription in enabling patterns, processes and interactions too small, subtle, remote or dispersed to be discerned unaided to be made visible and graspable within a single graph or chart (Latour, 1999). For such scholars, these modes of translation and representation constitute a technological sensorium which renders the hitherto imperceptible available to human apprehension (Latour, 2004; Mason and Hope, 2014). Maps, in particular, are noted for this capacity to make visible patterns and circulations which cannot be perceived ‘on the ground’ and to open them to reflection and consideration. Yet each mode of mapping also tends to render certain spaces and circulations invisible (Monmonier, 1996), making them difficult to perceive and prone to being ignored, overlooked or forgotten. For instance, Van Schendel (2002) observes that area studies scholars’ intellectual partitioning of Asia into Eastern, Southeastern, Southern and Central zones has made maps depicting the region which he calls Zomia (spanning the eastern Himalayas and the uplands of southern China and Southeast Asia) into rare curiosities and discouraged the institutionalisation of research into its peoples and environments. Relatedly, Neocleous (2003) notes that the invisibility of non-state ethnic and national identities on most political maps often serves to deflect academic and media scrutiny from the suffering caused when states enter into conflict against subnational insurgencies. As Nishiyama (2022: 548) notes, ‘Selective representation can indeed be understood as a type or component of ignorance’. This special issue’s constituent articles develop this insight by examining how state and corporate cartographies make certain territories and their inhabitants invisible and illegible, rendering them inaccessible for study and contemplation within hegemonic knowledge regimes and thus erasing them from knowability.

Karolien van Teijlingen’s article ‘Mapping the truth about mining: Corporate cartography and its contestations’ examines the techniques through which mining companies operating in the Ecuadorian Amazon – and the consultants whom they engage – produce (non-)knowledge about the environmental and social harms caused by extractive industries development. Mobilising the Foucauldian concept of power/knowledge, she argues that ‘corporate science forms a ‘regime of truth’: a set of statements about the world that have become considered as true, and in particular the techniques, persons and procedures that have become accepted as capable of producing and governing truths’ (van Teijlingen, 2025). Engaging critical cartography scholarship, van Teijlingen mobilises both deconstructive readings of corporate maps and interviews with engineers and consultants involved in corporate cartographic practices to examine how actors within the corporate science regime use mapmaking both to enunciate their own truth-claims regarding the impacts of mining and to disqualify conflicting accounts advanced by Indigenous groups. Tracing the making of several corporate maps, she shows how they take form through largely desk-based operations in which estimated ‘zones of environmental impact’ are projected onto topographical maps sourced from government geodatabases. van Teijlingen highlights that Indigenous communities frequently go unrecorded within these geodatabases, due to a structural bias both towards the preferential recording of larger communities of colonos (mestizo migrants) within state statistical procedures and towards connecting these communities to roads from which they might be seen visually by visiting environmental consultants. She thus shows how ‘racial and colonial legacies of exclusion and erasure became baked into corporate maps’ (van Teijlingen, 2025) – making Indigenous communities, territories and sacred sites invisible and imperceptible (and thus rendering the effects of mining upon them unknowable) within the representational repertoires of corporate cartography. van Teijlingen then examines counter-maps produced by activists and Indigenous community members, demonstrating how their engaged and embodied mapping methodologies can surface knowledges, meanings and territorial transformations which the truth regime of corporate cartography erases and dismisses. Unpacking the contrasting conventions of validity and credibility which give rise to these mappings – particularly their valorisation of embodied traversal of the territories represented and of accountability to and validation by local communities – van Teijlingen illustrates the contingency of corporate science’s regime of truth and the contestability of its cartographic erasures. Yet she also concludes by cautioning that the forced eviction of several communities from sites of planned mine development – a material enactment of corporate cartography’s representational emptying of the landscape – demonstrates that such mappings ‘are not only shaped by but also give shape to “racialized ignorance” and erasure’ (van Teijlingen, 2025).

Merav Amir’s paper, ‘Cartographic ignorance and territorial misrepresentation: The 1967 redrawing of Israel’s national map’, expands upon this insight through exploring both the context and the long-term effects of the Israeli security cabinet’s decision to redraw their country’s official national map in the wake of its June 1967 war against Egypt, Jordan and Syria. This decision replaced the ‘Green Line’ which had marked Israel’s internationally recognised borders since 1948 with the 1967 ceasefire line. It thus resulted in the cartographic incorporation of territories occupied by the Israeli military during the conflict (including East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, the Syrian Plateau and the Sinai Peninsula) into Israel on all official Israeli government-issued maps. This decision’s effect over the following decades, Amir argues, has been to render Israeli citizens increasingly ignorant both of where the boundary between Israeli sovereign territory and that subject to military occupation lies and of the difference between these two spaces. As a result, Israelis regularly stray unknowingly into occupied Palestinian territories – occasionally with fatal results. Drawing on a close reading of recently released records of the 1967 cabinet debates which informed this decision, Amir attempts to excavate the origins and logics of this puzzling form of geographical ignorance in which the Israeli state appears to have rendered the terrain under its control dangerously illegible and inscrutable to its own citizens. Tracing these cabinet discussions, Amir suggests that the purpose of erasing the Green Line from official maps was less to conceal Israel’s colonial expansion from outside observers than to instil in Israelis an acceptance of this de facto territorial enlargement as a new ‘political reality’ and a corollary unawareness that maintaining it would require a long-term military occupation. In this sense, she argues, the erasure of the Green Line originates from an attempt to preserve the self-image not only of Israeli citizens and the Israeli state but of the very politicians responsible for instituting the occupation through eradicating its settler–colonial nature from public visibility and consciousness. Amir, nevertheless, suggests that many of the ministers involved (who often opposed complete annexation of the occupied territories) failed to understand the durable transformations that the redrawing of the national map would trigger in the spatiality of Israeli nationhood. As a result, these politicians’ foundational ignorance of the geopolitical implications of their own actions also ‘fostered Israelis’ ignorance of the expansionist intentionality of their state and made way for their becoming oblivious colonisers’ (Amir, 2025).

Ignorance

Amir’s paper underlines that mapping practices do not simply depict specific territories and processes, nor do they yield only wayfinding technologies which facilitate particular patterns of mobility and circulation (Brice, 2020; Donaldson et al., 2020; November et al., 2010). Through symbolic display, integration into everyday navigational practice and mobilisation to articulate or contest contentious claims to territories and resources, influential mappings sediment themselves into cultural conventions and political projects. Given sufficiently consistent reproduction, reaffirmation and repetition in use, maps can become central to the taken for granted orderings not only of space and time but of conceptions of identity and difference which inform the construction of collective regional and national selves and external Others and which (relatedly) organise understandings of proximity and distance (Rossetto and Lo Presti, 2022). The modes of spatiotemporal (un)knowing, and the divisions between the visible and the imperceptible which express themselves through maps, therefore often undergird the geographical assumptions and imaginaries which organise political and cultural communities. Importantly, through the efforts of states to realise such spatial divisions materially and to impose internal homogeneity on the territories which such mappings depict (Harley and Laxton, 2001; Neocleous, 2003), the orderings of knowledge and ignorance which often underlie them may also shape the making of inequalities of wealth, power and prestige. The result is, as Leuenberger and Schnell (2010: 805) observe, that: ‘Any map (. . .) can become a tool to shape, legitimize, and institutionalize certain forms of knowledge and collective spatial imaginations’. The papers which make up the final section of this special issue expand upon this insight through examining how the modes of ignorance generated by virtue of inattention to certain scales and spaces and the production of inscrutable territories through cartographic practices become interwoven with the making of geographical imaginaries and the rescaling of political geographies.

Melissa Forcione and colleagues’ paper, ‘Settler-colonial geographical ignorance in Canadian education’, analyses how hegemonic cartographic imaginaries of homogeneous national spaces are instilled through Canadian education and examines their role in rendering many settler Canadians ignorant of their historical and contemporary relationality towards Indigenous peoples. In so doing, they introduce the concept of colonial geographical ignorance. This term describes the ways in which forms of colonial ignorance premised upon forgetting, dismissing and erasing the histories, cultures and contemporary existence of Indigenous peoples intersect with the geographical imaginaries through which members of settler societies understand the ordering of time-space and relate to place. Forcione and her co-authors identify three components of colonial geographical ignorance which are reproduced by and through school curricula across Canada. First, an imaginary of Indigenous peoples as temporally and spatially distant means that ‘practices and processes of genocide, displacement and land dispossession are imagined as historical “events” long past and disconnected from contemporary life’ (Forcione et al., 2025) and obfuscates the presence of Indigenous people in urban spaces. Second, an imaginary of Canada as a homogeneous national space collapses diverse Indigenous peoples and polities into a single self-identical cultural category which may be positioned as just one among many cultures which exist within contemporary liberal settler states. In so doing, they argue, these imaginings facilitate ‘a denial of non- Indigenous people’s implication and responsibilities in and for their own colonial histories and geographies’ (Forcione et al., 2025). This both licences a rejection of political obligations towards Indigenous peoples (which they term a stance of non-relationality) and fosters an inattention to and incuriosity about the realities of Indigenous life. Drawing upon the results of a survey administered to 1780 entering and 1186 exiting university students across several Canadian universities, they identify evidence of widespread colonial geographical ignorance – with many post-secondary students believing erroneously (for instance) that Indigenous people live mainly on reserves, that they share a single culture and that Indigenous populations are declining. Importantly, they find that students who have experienced greater exposure to Indigenous topics during high-school education tend not only to demonstrate more accurate knowledge about Indigenous life but to express greater interest in and concern about persistent Indigenous/settler inequalities than their peers. They conclude that: ‘Education that enhances and shifts settler consciousness and engagement with Indigenous topics and perspectives is therefore fundamental to interrupting the denial of relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous existence’ (Forcione et al., 2025).

Finally, Persis Taraporevala’s article, ‘Smart ignorance: Instrumentalising useful unknowns to bureaucratise and rescale power in the city’, complements Forcione and colleagues’ analysis of the role of colonial geographical ignorance in constituting and shaping national territories by tracing how ignorance can be employed strategically to transform and rescale the political geographies of state power. Taraporevala mobilises institutional ethnography and elite interviews with politicians, government workers and civil society campaigners to explore the controversial political restructuring which accompanied preparations to implement a smart city project in Pune, one of the earliest and most contested sites selected for the Federal Government of India’s ‘Smart Cities Mission’. Tracing the genealogy of Pune’s city government, she shows that bureaucratic ambiguities which make it impossible to be certain who ‘is in charge of’ and represents the city have long characterised colonial and postcolonial municipal governance in India and also persist within the Federal Government’s refusal to define precisely what a smart city might be. Taraporevala argues that in Pune, longstanding ambiguities concerning whether final authority rests with elected legislators or the bureaucratic executive branch of the city government became instrumentalised as ‘useful unknowns’ to facilitate the transfer of powers from the city government to a government-owned corporate Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which would oversee smart city projects. She explains how members of the executive branch impeded the translation of key documents concerning the ownership of the SPV and the arrangements for its municipal oversight and delayed their release to legislators – leaving them unable to know what authority they would exercise over this nebulous parastatal entity or how they might hold it to account. Taraporevala shows that these tactics enabled the municipal executive to allocate the overwhelming majority of shares in this SPV either to senior city bureaucrats or to regional government administrators, leaving elected legislators with symbolic rights to oversee its operations but little power to influence its decision-making. In this way, Taraporevala complicates existing accounts of smart city initiatives as exercises in neoliberal entrepreneurial urban governance which weaken the authority of state institutions and empower private sector actors. Instead, she illustrates how the strategic employment of ignorance facilitates a bureaucratisation of the state – ‘a form of rescaling that specifically extends the power of non-elected governmental administrators’ (Taraporevala, 2025) – which transforms the political geographies of urban governance through concentrating executive authority at a regional rather than municipal scale.

Conclusion: Geographical unknowing

The contributions to this special issue of Environment and Planning F illustrate how transport research methodologies based on measuring the pressure exerted on roads and capturing car number plates occasion official inattention to and neglect of cyclists (Nikolaeva, 2025). They show how the scalar norms of ecological fieldwork long inhibited the recognition of and production of knowledge about urban ecologies (Chalmandrier et al., 2025). They trace how mapping practices have helped to render the impacts of extractive activity on Indigenous territories and communities imperceptible (van Teijlingen, 2025) and to inculcate unawareness of the occupation of the Palestinian territories among the Israeli public (Amir, 2025). They unpack the role of educational curricula in reproducing colonial geographical imaginaries which enable citizens of settler–colonial polities to deny the presence of and their relationality to Indigenous peoples (Forcione et al., 2025). In doing so, they emphasise that many of the practices through which geographers habitually generate and circulate the forms of knowledge which characterise our discipline are themselves implicated in the production of particular spatialities and temporalities of unknowing. While this is likely inevitable given ignorance studies scholarship’s contention that knowledge production is inseparable from agnogenesis (Gross, 2010; Murphy, 2006; Tuana, 2004), this special issue’s constituent articles demonstrate powerfully that these distinctly geographical modes of unknowing are often far from innocent. Indeed, their entanglements with and appropriation by governmental, corporate and military institutions, logics and apparatuses often make them deeply complicit in the implementation, rationalisation and concealment of harms, inequities and injustices ranging from environmental pollution and the weakening of democratic governance to land theft and the perpetuation of dangerous cycling conditions.

As Melissa Forcione and her colleagues observe in this issue, the examination of unknowing geographies thus also offers: ‘an opportunity to interrogate how the discipline’s own educational and research pursuits are sustaining or challenging ways of unknowing that impede anti- and de-colonial change’. Geographers perhaps bear an especially heavy historical responsibility to undertake reflection of this sort. Despite the discipline’s longstanding commitment to critically engaged scholarship, contemporary geographers inherit a plethora of research practices and representational conventions whose origins are bound up closely with expeditionary and cartographic projects which facilitated the European imperial expansion of centuries past (Gregory, 1998). While geographical research of these previous eras was often propelled by the lure of mapping uncharted territories into knowledge (Naylor and Ryan, 2010), the European cartographic practice of depicting ‘unknown’ lands as blank spaces was also deeply implicated in erasing their inhabitants from consideration and disseminating the fiction that these territories were undiscovered, unclaimed and unpeopled (Harley, 1992; Ryan, 1995). Indeed, European states’ mapmaking practices were central to ‘the reorganization and redistribution of space to suit (. . .) an exercise of power’ (Neocleous, 2003: 419) within colonised lands, and were notably complicit in marginalising or expunging Indigenous peoples’ knowledges of, relationships to and claims upon these environments through the reclassification and renaming of places and terrains (Nishiyama, 2022). Moreover, colonial geographers were often deeply involved in recording, mapping and spatialising supposedly innate biological and cognitive differences between human groups in ways which contributed to racial taxonomies that constructed Europeans as spatially, temporally and (often) evolutionarily distant from other peoples (Clement, 2020). Geographical knowledges are thus themselves shot through with techniques of unknowing which, although increasingly problematised by post-colonial and decolonial scholarship (Martin and Armston-Sheret, 2020; Radcliffe, 2017), will require further scrutiny if geography as a discipline is to reckon with its imperial past and with its position in the political–economic orders of the present. As Mills (2007) observes, the forgetting of such past epistemic injustices (itself a form of unknowing) often serves to impede restitution in the present and to secure the future reproduction of inequalities.

An unknowing geographies sensibility can help researchers to understand why certain places remain unmapped, some histories are forgotten and particular futures go unanticipated. It can open up means of investigating how the making of such unknown times and spaces might be entwined with the selective erasure of exploitation, violence and inequality or the effacement of Indigenous and vernacular knowledges. By drawing attention to the ways in which these processes of agnogenesis operate, it can situate them within particular locations and practices which might be transformed, map the networks through which the ignorance that they produce circulates and specify the geographical imaginaries which they uphold. It can thereby facilitate the identification of sites and modes of intervention through which the production and reproduction of oppressive modes of (un)knowing might be disrupted and interdicted. This gives unknowing geographies scholarship the potential to provide impetus to citizen science projects which challenge official inattention to neglected scales of environmental and social injustice (Kinchy, 2020; Kinchy et al., 2016) and to counter-mapping practices which render formerly insensible injustices visible and perceptible (Arancibia and Motta, 2019; van Teijlingen, 2025). It also equips such research to facilitate social activism and educational reform aimed at unsettling the colonial geographical imaginaries which justify and naturalise the dispossession and marginalisation of Indigenous peoples (Forcione et al, this issue). In the context of ongoing assaults against numerous domains both of politically engaged environmental science and of critical social science and humanities research, these projects remain vitally important and are if anything growing increasingly urgent. However, an attention to the spatial and temporal dimensions of unknowing can and should also entail an invitation to engage critically with the omissions and erasures implicit in geographical scholarship’s own modes of knowledge production and an injunction to examine their part in configuring historical and contemporary structures of oppression and injustice. The project of unknowing geographies, then, is not simply to produce more knowledge about the time-spaces, mobilities or political geographies of ignorance. Nor is it solely to interfere with and transform prevailing modes of agnogenesis. It is also to encourage geographers to approach our own disciplinary techniques and practices of (un)knowing more attentively, reflexively and curiously and perhaps, through confronting their often-uncomfortable histories and presents, to refashion them into forms better-suited to contribute to the creation of environmentally and socially just futures.