2014 -- Manufacturing Denial and the Assault on Scholarship and Truth

Since the 1980s, genocide denial, particularly of the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide, has generated a substantial body of literature analyzing and documenting the methods and rhetoric of those who seek to negate or obscure documented cases of mass violence. More recently, an impressive amount of literature has explored the ways in which various industries and political operatives have used the strategy of “manufacturing doubt” to undermine the scientific consensus on smoking, pollution, evolution, and global warming. Historian of science Robert N. Proctor has coined the term “agnotology” to describe this production of ignorance—since ignorance is often not merely the absence of knowledge but the outcome of a deliberate effort to obscure knowledge.

Although these efforts stretch from governments to corporations to grass roots organizations, the focus of this conference will be on the ways in which scholarship and the academy function as a primary battleground in a struggle that resonates far beyond academia. Until now, social scientists and natural scientists have not converged to discuss the analogous and interrelated (though not always identical) phenomena of genocide denial and the denial of scientific truth. Presentations offering specific parallels will be welcome but the overall hope is to stimulate comparative discourse and to encourage further work on the subject.