Buying pre-order items
Ebooks and Audiobook
You will receive an email with a download link for the ebook or audiobook on the publication date.
Payment
You will not be charged for pre-ordered books until they are available to be shipped. Pre-ordered ebooks will not be charged for until they are available for download.
Amending or cancelling your order
For orders that have not been shipped you can usually make changes to pre-orders up to 72 hours before the publishing date.
Payment for this pre-order will be taken when the item becomes available
Description
In some cases, ignorance can be a deliberate tactic designed to shield hegemony.
In Ignorance by Design, Ryan L. Holmes reframes ignorance as an active social force rather than a simple absence of knowledge, showing how, in certain forms, it is cultivated in order to uphold structures of white male supremacy. Moving across philosophy, race theory, and the sociology of knowledge, Holmes maps the ways “unknowing” is built into institutions, everyday language, and the stories people tell about themselves and others. What emerges is a portrait of a culture in which misunderstanding is not accidental but patterned, shaping perception while insulating dominance from meaningful challenge.
Holmes situates these patterns within a longer history, showing how inherited habits of thought continue to organize contemporary life. He identifies distinct modes of ignorance at work today and connects them to forms of epistemic injustice, including the dismissal of marginalized voices, gaps in shared interpretive frameworks, and harms embedded in the narratives societies circulate. At the book's core is a sustained focus on storytelling: the reigning narratives that normalize inequality and the counter-narratives that make recognition-and change-possible.
The closing chapters turn toward reconstruction, sketching practices grounded in humility, empathy, and a willingness to question one's own interpretive limits. Holmes invites readers to reconsider not only what they know, but how they have come to know it. The result is a probing, accessible account of knowledge's blind spots-and a call to participate in reshaping them, with implications that reach far beyond the page.
Accessibility Information
Additional accessibility information
- EPUB 3.0
- Conforms with the requirements of EPUB Accessibility Spec v1.1
- WCAG level AA
- WCAG v2.2 compliant
- accessibility@bloomsbury.com
Hazards
The publication contains no hazards
Support for non-visual reading
- No accessibility features offered by the reading system, device or reading software are disabled or otherwise unusable with the product
- Has alternative text descriptions for images
Visual adjustments
Appearance of the text and page layout can be modified according to the capabilities of the reading system (font family and size, spaces, as well as color of background and text)
Navigation
- Page list to go to pages from the print source version
- Elements such as headings, tables, etc for structured navigation
- All or substantially all textual matter is arranged in a single logical reading order
- Content is enhanced with ARIA roles to optimize organization and facilitate navigation
- Purposes of all links are made clear
Rich content
Language tagging provided
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Story You Tell Yourself About Yourself: Reflections on Ignorance, White Male Supremacy, and Social Constructions
Chapter 2: The Narrative of Whiteness: Race, Gender, and the Making of People
Chapter 3: The Black/White Binary and The Fluidity of Whiteness
Chapter 4: Knowing In An Age of Ignorance
Chapter 5: Mapping Ignorance: Labeling the Types of Non-Knowing
Chapter 6: Mapping Ignorance: Analyzing Epistemic Injustice
Chapter 7: Epistemic Reconstruction: Developing Critical Hope and Interdependence
Closing Remarks
References
Index
About the Author
Product details
| Published | 21 Jan 2027 |
|---|---|
| Format | Ebook (Epub & Mobi) |
| Edition | 1st |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 9781978761841 |
| Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
Reviews
Related Titles
