This paper explores the concept of agnotology, the deliberate production of ignorance, within the context of modern scientific endeavors, particularly in the corporate and technological sectors. It examines how industries use various tactics to manipulate public understanding of scientific issues, often to protect profits and limit liability. The rise of private sector funding and the increasing reliance on technologies like AI and machine learning have exacerbated this process by making scientific inquiry more opaque and less accountable. Ultimately, we argue that as knowledge production becomes more entangled with corporate interests and technological systems, traditional methods of oversight and regulation are insufficient to combat the growing influence of agnotology.
This is an accepted Special Topics Panel for the Modern Language Association Conference in Toronto, January 8-11, 2026.
Agnotology, a term popularized by Historian of Science, Robert N. Proctor, refers to the study of culturally induced ignorance or doubt, particularly through the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data. In the context of media and technology, agnotology is seen in how information can be presented, manipulated, or withheld to create or perpetuate ignorance or misunderstanding among the public. These presentations aim to spark conversation by exploring how ignorance takes shape across three distinct cultural contexts.
In “The Will-Not-To-Know: Prison Sexology and the Archive of Homosexuality in Colonial India,” Rovel Sequeira reinterprets early 20th-century colonial prisons as laboratories not only of sexual science but of ignorance production. The paper examines the role of agnotology in a suppressed scandal involving prison medical officers in Calcutta and the Andaman Islands, whose studies of same-sex practices among prisoners were censored by the colonial state. Labeled unscientific, these findings were barred from circulation even as they shaped prison discipline. This contradiction reveals a colonial will-to-ignorance: a refusal not only to generate knowledge but to allow its existence. Colonial sexology, rather than driven by a Foucauldian will-to-knowledge, operated through deliberate erasure. As focus shifted from anatomy to the surveillance of prisoner correspondence, knowledge was produced under intensified oversight and simultaneously disavowed. Ignorance became infrastructural, structuring sexual deviance as moral excess and legitimizing punitive isolation, while ensuring such knowledge remained hidden from public and scientific view.
Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte’s “Becoming A Crocodile: Brazilian Anti-Vaccine and Pro-Vaccine Memes During COVID-19,” explores Brazil’s pandemic media landscape. Amid staggering COVID-19 death tolls, President Jair Bolsonaro fostered a culture of denialism by downplaying the virus, spreading vaccine misinformation, withholding federal health funds, and calling COVID a “gripezinha.” Despite contracting the virus, Bolsonaro refused vaccination, later falsifying his vaccine card to enable international travel. Oliveira-Monte examines how this state-sponsored agnotology extended into digital culture through anti-vaccine memes that circulated widely on social media, reinforcing doubt and misinformation. These were met with counter-memes using satire and humor to expose Bolsonaro’s contradictions and encourage vaccination. By tracing this meme-based culture war, the paper shows how agnotology was both state policy and grassroots resistance battleground—mobilized to obscure science, but also to reassert it through digital critique and popular dissent.
In “Artificial Ignorance: Understanding the Role of AI in Modern Agnotology,” Amit Ray examines the deliberate opacity of Big Tech. Technology giants such as Google and Meta deploy secrecy to shield algorithms and data practices, often under the guise of trade protection and competitive advantage. These practices pose significant risks to individual privacy, democratic oversight, and ethical data use. Generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has exacerbated this opacity through proprietary systems and inscrutable neural networks. While firms claim progress in transparency, most efforts amount to “open-washing,” masking closed, profit-driven operations as altruistic openness. The lack of meaningful regulation allows continued misuse, despite growing awareness of algorithmic bias and discrimination. The paper explores how open-source movements and independent research attempt to counterbalance Big Tech’s dominance, but these efforts often fall short against entrenched economic incentives. Ultimately, this analysis calls for robust regulation and genuinely open, accountable AI systems.
Together, these three studies reveal that agnotology is not simply the absence of knowledge, but a strategic, contingent, and often institutional practice of withholding, obscuring, or discrediting information. Through the lenses of empire, media, and machine, these works show how agnotology is by no means a new phenomenon but is historically persistent and evolving in form. In the colonial archive, ignorance was enforced through institutional censorship and the classification of knowledge as deviant. In the digital pandemic age, ignorance moved through memes, state disinformation, and satirical resistance. In the age of AI, ignorance is embedded in algorithmic architectures, proprietary systems, and the economic logics that sustain them.
What links all three is the recognition that ignorance is not neutral. It is a political artifact shaped by institutions past and present—whether imperial, governmental, or corporate—often in service of control. Yet, each study also opens space for critique, resistance, and the reassertion of alternative epistemologies. The struggle over knowledge is ongoing and alive. In mapping these sites—colonial, viral, and computational—this synthesis calls for a broader awareness of how agnotology functions in our world, and more importantly, how it might be dismantled. Confronting the infrastructures of ignorance requires not only better transparency and regulation, but cultural strategies, historical awareness, and a commitment to epistemic justice that recognizes whose knowledge counts—and whose is erased.
Bios
Rovel Sequeira is an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and of English (by courtesy) at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Rovel is currently working on a book manuscript on sexual scientific histories and fictions in India, tentatively titled The Empire and its Deviants: Global Sexology and the Racial Grammar of Sex in Colonial India. Rovel’s work has been published in Modernism/modernity, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and History of the Human Sciences, among other venues.
Emanuelle Oliveira-Monte is an Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Vanderbilt University. She has authored two books and several articles on her field. Her book Writing Identity: The Politics of Contemporary Afro-Brazilian Literature examines the intricate connections between literary production and political action by focusing on the politics of the Brazilian black movement and the literature of São Paulo-based Afro-Brazilian writers, the Quilombhoje. She serves the profession through committees in several professional associations, including the Brazilian Studies Association and the Latin American Studies Association. She currently serves as the LLC Luso-Brazilian Delegate in the MLA Delegate Assembly.
Amit Ray is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Trained as a postcolonialist, his recent research focuses on issues of secrecy and agnotology within contemporary information systems. With neurologist Dr. E. Ray Dorsey, he co-authored “Paraquat, Parkinson’s Disease, and Agnotology,” published in the journal Movement Disorders in 2023. Since its publication, the article has been reprinted twice, which has led to subpoenas from Syngenta Corporation, a leading producer of the herbicide Paraquat, as part of ongoing class-action lawsuits.
Ray Dorsey and I published an article on “Paraquat, Parkinson’s, and Agnotology” which appeared in Movement Disorders in March of 2023. It has since been reprinted twice in The New Lede, andArts and Opinion. The article elicited a subpoena from Swiss-headquartered Syngenta Corporation (a division of Chinese-owned Sinochem) regarding pending lawsuits against them from Parkinson’s patients. It is worth noting that Syngenta manufactures Paraquat in the north of England, but the pesticide is banned in Switzerland, the UK, and China.
A melting planet, an accelerating (accelerant) species. Hyper nationalism and ideological militancy… I mean what’s not to like about a species that toys with its own extinction, as it demands growth on every front that can be monetized and brought into financial logic? Our very extinction seems to be available for extraction and profit—a growth industry that ends in collapse. Ours is a species in bloom. #autocolonialism
Capitalism and War unleash human biology in recombinant and hybrid ways. In this sense the human begins to actively restructure itself. And, militaries and companies are the ones that are exploring such processes most intensively. Such invisibility begets all kinds of trauma, deformation, and amnesia-cal qualities in a species toto. It boggles my mind. This is happening. Much has likely already happened. The big nation states have only ever been war machines, no?
And corporations eased themselves into alignment over much of the last century. Corpor-national phenomena.
They are our militarily industrialized complexities, within which secrecy abounds
This evacuates and exhausts me. I suspect it exhausts those within and outside what we might consider to be the spectrum between secrecy and propriety. Secrets of trade and otherwise.
Our missing cores, our absent presences.
We, as a species, are dangerous. And we are self-destructing.
And its as if there is nothing we can do…this is what we are made of. This is the tissue, the latticework of ages. These last remnants of (en-machinated) language.
These gasps, if you will. #languageisleavingus
I repeat: This is a species that will be content to self-destruct, given it was functionally built upon machines of war, first and foremost. As we extend into the nucleus of not just the atom, but of the cell. As mere decades pass. (And to think we’re still here.)
I don’t want to be a part of it, for the most part. But here we are. This is what extinction feels like. And we are doing it to ourselves. #autocolonialism
Capitalism and War unleash human biology in recombinant and hybrid ways. This happens not in decades, but in years. #talesofthelatehuman
We are bound for it to be this way. We lead with our own complicity in all of it. This is the human, of late.
We are the extinction event.
(Make of this word and brain salad what you will. Words fail me.)
CRISPR is derived from a bacterial mechanism that provides immunity from viruses by using RNA to cut and paste snippets of the viral attacker into the genetic code of the bacterium itself.
There are large scale endeavors to use genetic editing strategies to engineer responses to actual viruses. The arguments for expediency and exigency abound.
That these things come into our knowledge and come into technoscientific existence so quickly —seemingly all at once—- makes my brain hurt.
This is all happening so fast, my friends. Much of it in less than a decade. And even that short time scale seems to be compacting upon itself.
PostScript Sat March 15
But what we never seem to understand is that just because we have power doesn’t mean we are in control. Which, I am convinced, speeds up the process of humans attempting to colonize, cum synthesize, cum automate their individual AND aggregate activities. Whether we can admit it or not, synthetic biology is already here. A crisis like this will only expedite acknowledging the transformation of current and subsequent Homo sapiens genetics, before, during and after ‘expression’.
A species expands asymptotically, no longer what it thought it was, unbecoming in media res.
Accelerators and accelerants, recombinant and chaotic. Synthetic life emerges from this bacterial animal which, having colonized everything, learns to colonize anew. It grows, it devours, it blooms, it dies. But not without giving birth to other forms of life, intentionally and otherwise. The Xenobots arrive.
I’ve lost interest in maintaining anything other than spoken voice—presence. Writing seems like failure.
The rate of extraction of our linguistic domains, written and spoken, feels like extinction to me. Nothing else. Those at the top, we apex predators, best flee the earth or hack our own genomes and biomes to give ourselves, up and over, to other possible worlds, living and dead. We at the top are the most precarious of all. This is what I like to call autocolonialism. (“We do it to ourselves, we do.”) Naming it, defining it, giving it shape and form in language seems to do nothing more than extract further the value of whatever resistance might be articulated, rendered, voiced. I feel as though language is leaving us.
“If we now ask whether the human species can be considered a good or a bad race (it can be called a race only when one thinks of it as a species of rational beings on earth, compared to those rational beings on other planets, sprung as a multitude of creatures from one demiurge), then I must confess that there is not much to boast about. Nevertheless, anyone who considers human behavior not only in ancient history, but also in recent history will often be tempted to coincide with Timon’s misanthropic judgment, but far more often and more to the point, he will coincide with Momus, and find foolishness rather than evil the most striking characteristic of our species. But, since foolishness combined with traces of evil (when it is called madness) cannot be ignored in the moral physiognomy of our species, it is obvious from the concealment of a good part of our thoughts, which every clever person deems essential, that everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely. This behavior betrays the tendency of our species to be evil-minded toward one another.” Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798)
Anominous 