Introduction – Unknowing geographies: Situating inattention, inscrutability and ignorance

This article introduces a special issue entitled ‘Unknowing Geographies: Situating Ignorance, Inattention and Inscrutability’ which aims to catalyse a community of critically engaged ‘unknowing geographies’ scholarship. The special issue assembles research which combines ignorance studies scholarship’s observation that ignorance is constituted through active processes of unknowing that are inextricably entangled with knowledge practices with a geographical attentiveness to the spatialities and temporalities of knowledge production. It argues that this approach enables scholars to apprehend (un)knowing as a process which is inescapably geographically situated and thus to trace the ways in which it becomes embroiled in the ordering of space, time and mobility through its encounters with political projects, commercial interests, epistemic conventions and/or socio-cultural imaginaries. This means that geographical theories, concepts and methods are especially well-placed to enrich existing analyses of the organisation and implications of (un)knowing but also that it is important for geography as a discipline to consider the role of its own knowledge practices in constituting, configuring and distributing ignorance. The article focuses readers’ attention on different dimensions of unknowing geographies through exploring how the contributors to this special issue examine the shaping of inattention to particular scales, places and circulations; the generation of inscrutable time-spaces; and the ways that the forms of geographical ignorance which they occasion intervene in the ordering of political, urban and environmental geographies.