ABSTRACT
As modern societies have become increasingly technological, science has become both more important and more politicized. Funding shifts into new research fields and out of old ones, and the changes in priorities among research fields also reorder the contours of what is known and unknown. Scientists sometimes join social movements or provide research support for movements that have identified environmental, health, and other risks but have not been able to convince policymakers to respond with better regulation. The opening up of the scientific field to the perspectives of social movements and communities also has implications for technology policy, which has undergone its own transitions to include, albeit often in highly controlled ways, greater levels of public engagement in the policy process through various mechanisms of public consultation. Situated within the broad interdisciplinary study of ignorance, undone science can be categorized as a known unknown rather than an unknown unknown.
