ABSTRACT
In the age of anger, economic crisis, moral outrage, and digitalization of everyday life, issues of ignorance and inequality are two particularly troubling and intellectually challenging areas. In accordance with the surveys of World Economic Forum, ignorance, as “large-scale cyberattacks and breakdown of critical information infrastructure and networks,” is regarded as the second highest risk to society in 2019. With the explosion of the attention economy, political communication and the global Internet access, user activists and others have contributed to a global crisis of facts that take a strong toll on the functioning of democratic society. The aim of this chapter is to show how strategic ignorance in the field of racialization, racism, and nationalism works by using illustrations from Denmark. Illustrations come from a recent research project on racialization that includes the study of a series of media events, commentaries and ethnographic interviews. The analysis of these events show how strategic ignorance works as well as situating them within the larger media landscape. The analysis leads up to argue for the need for media anthropology to engage in this huge challenge to society that could start with a collective effort in developing an “epistemology of ignorance.”
