Deploying Ignorance as Resistance: Theorizing and Applying Posthuman Ignorance

• In Event: Pedagogies of Ignorance and Authoritarian Epistemologies: Cyborg Surveillance States, Meme Warfare, and MAGA Drag Queens

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
This paper develops and applies a posthuman theory of ignorance by drawing on posthuman empiricism and antiblackness theory. It advances the argument that ignorance is not only a byproduct of power but also an entangled, generative force in knowledge production that can be redeployed toward resistant ends.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework
Beginning with Tuana’s (2006) taxonomy of ignorance, this paper assumes ignorance is socially constructed and constitutive of epistemological formations. Tuana argues that ignorance is produced through various social processes, often in service of hegemonic structures. However, her framework is grounded in standpoint theory, which may inadvertently re-center the human as a stable epistemic subject.

To address this limitation, I propose a theory of posthuman ignorance, grounded in posthuman empiricism (Author, in press) and Barad’s (2007) agential realism. Knowledge, in this framework, is the effect of agential cuts—moments in which a phenomenon is made intelligible through discourse, measurement, or curricular logic, while other possibilities are rendered unintelligible or disappeared (Author, 2022). Ignorance is not merely absence, but an emergent property of these cuts, entangled with power, materiality, and resistance.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry
To explore posthuman ignorance, I analyze a case study using post-qualitative inquiry. Drawing on Barad’s diffraction and informed by posthumanist critiques of representation, I engage in a situated reading of curricular practice and institutional structures. Inspired by Lather’s (2007) call for “getting lost” in complexity, I trace intra-actions between discourse, policy, pedagogy, and resistance. This approach enables analysis of ignorance not only through exclusion, but through the unintended effects of even anti-oppressive interventions.

Data sources
The analysis centers on a job fair held at a majority-Black middle school on Chicago’s West Side—an antiracist curricular intervention aimed at expanding students’ imagined futures. Planning documents, assessment rubrics, funding requirements, and observational reflections serve as primary data. These are not treated as static texts, but as artifacts within an entangled assemblage of discursive, material, and affective forces. As Barad (2007) writes, “practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world” (p. 91). Through this lens, the data trace the intra-actions through which ignorance and knowledge are co-constituted.

Results
Initially, we assumed we were countering ignorance—students’ lack of awareness about future careers. This aligned with Tuana’s model of constructed ignorance. But posthuman analysis revealed that ignorance was not singular or linear. Students excluded due to racialized disciplinary write-ups became unknowable within the formal structure. Yet the same systems that erased them also allowed subversion: some teachers quietly allowed excluded students to participate, their disappearance creating space for presence. Ignorance here became both a tool of exclusion and a site of resistance.

Scientific or scholarly significance
This paper contributes to curriculum studies and posthuman educational theory by reframing ignorance as a relational, emergent force. Rather than only a deficit or ideological tool, ignorance can be generative—capable of disrupting and reconfiguring power. This reconceptualization opens new possibilities for anti-oppressive pedagogy in racialized schooling contexts.

Author

• Alexander B. Pratt, University of Memphis