I’ve just come across the work of Joanne Gaudet, a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa who has been working on issues of ignorance and the productivity of ignorance from a sociological — and especially sociology of science — point of view. She has a website with a number of interesting looking working papers at http://www.ignorancemobilization.com (edit: website no longer working).
She defines ‘ignorance mobilisation’ as follows:
Ignorance Mobilization
“The use of the borders and the limits of knowing, including the intentional and the unintentional consideration or bracketing out of what is not known, towards the achievement of goals (i.e., social, cultural, political, professional, and economic)”
(Gaudet, 2012, Gaudet et al., 2012)Ignorance mobilization complements ‘knowledge mobilization’ in the social scientific investigation of research and innovation.