Advancing a sociology of ignorance in the study of racism and racial non-knowing

Four studies examined the relation between college students' own attitudes toward alcohol use and their estimates of the attitudes of their peers. All studies found widespread evidence of pluralistic ignorance: Students believed that they were more uncomfortable with campus alcohol practices than was the average student. Study 2 demonstrated this perceived self-other difference also with respect to one's friends. Study 3 traced attitudes toward drinking over the course of a semester and found gender differences in response to perceived deviance: Male students shifted their attitudes over time in the direction of what they mistakenly believed to be the norm, whereas female students showed no such attitude change. Study 4 found that students' perceived deviance correlated with various measures of campus alienation, even though that deviance was illusory. The implications of these results for general issues of norm estimation and responses to perceived deviance are discussed.

This article raises questions about what the word 'knowledge' refers to. Drawn from some 40 years of collaborative work on knowledge democracy, the authors suggest that higher education institutions today are working with a very small part of the extensive and diverse knowledge systems in the world. Following from de Sousa Santos, they illustrate how Western knowledge has been engaged in epistemicide, or the killing of other knowledge systems. Community-based participatory research is about knowledge as an action strategy for change and about the rendering visible of the excluded knowledges of our remarkable planet. Knowledge stories, theoretical dimensions of knowledge democracy and the evolution of community-based participatory research partnerships are highlighted.