Stocking co-authors chapter in new book on ignorance studies
Associate Professor Emeritus Holly Stocking is author of a chapter in a new book, Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies.
“Purveyors of Ignorance: Journalists as Agents in the Social Construction of Scientific Ignorance,” is co-authored by Lisa Holstein. It examines how and why journalists respond to the manufacture of scientific ignorance in the news media. Stocking and Holstein argue that journalists sometimes become “unwittingly complicit” in powerful interests’ efforts to use the media to advance their own agendas.
Stocking retired in 2008 after 22 years of teaching and research. As an scholar of science communication and media ethics, she called this chapter “my swansong as an expert on ignorance,” while noting that “ignorance remains—as you might guess—a very fertile field.”