Ambiguous spaces, empirical traces: Accounting for ignorance when researching around the illicit

Abstract

Human geographers investigating socio-environmental change in resource frontiers often encounter illicit activities occurring alongside the licit processes they study. These encounters pose logistical challenges to conducting research and moral and analytical dilemmas for researchers. Illicit activities produce what we refer to as spheres of ambiguity, which obscure certain information, relationships, and phenomena surrounding them. We address the dearth of analytical tools for approaching the uncertainty this generates by bringing concepts from agnotology—the study of ignorance—to bear on research conducted amidst illicit activity, offering a framework for systematically evaluating ambiguous field data that is incompletely observed or reported.

The unknowing expert: Talking to a man about supply chains

“…We are regularly warned that they may barter their knowledge for insider information gleaned by researchers from their peers or disclose information selectively ‘in the hope that the interviewer will pass on interviewees' versions of events' (Clark, 1998, p. 80). Alternatively, they may profess ignorance of events and activities which contradict their preferred public image in order to close down uncomfortable questions or even evade legal liability (Dev et al, 2022; McGoey, 2012). According to such accounts, Nick's ‘ignorance‐talk’ might be indicative less of a methodological misfire than of an active attempt to divert attention from unflattering, inconvenient or incriminating information.…”

“…Methodological literatures rarely explore how researchers might handle such admissions of ignorance among supposedly expert interviewees (although see Dev et al, 2022). Perhaps they are assumed to reflect the interviewer's ineptitude-an ill-chosen question or an inability to elicit discussion of some rarely articulated form of tacit knowledge.…”