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The article addresses the issue of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe from the perspective of ignorance studies and seeks to establish the mechanisms whereby ignorance is created through categorizations. We depart from the proposal of Proctor and view ignorance as either “native state,” “lost realm,” or “strategic ploy.” In all three, ignorance is an unalienable part of social action. The case of Polish academic research on refugees before and after 2015 is explored in order to establish who ignores what, when, and why, when categorizing, and to analyze the relationship between ignorance and social action. In the Polish refugee field, the crisis of 2015 was the moment when the refugee issue stepped out of the shadows and attracted the attention of the public and policymakers. The analysis of the category “refugee” in Polish scholarship before 2015 demonstrates that the category was based on culturalization and idealization; thus, the socio-political and pragmatic aspects of the group’s characteristics and actions were systematically ignored, and the ignorance worked as a “lost realm.” After 2015, a new body of scholarship emerges in which the category “refugee” acquires negative connotations with security threat or fakeness. In the new scholarship, ignorance is a strategic framing that sets the category of “refugee” outside the humanitarian issues. We claim that the new categorizations follow the logic of culturalization and moralization typical of the previous period. Strategic ignorance inherent in the categorizations that dichotomize “good” and “bad” refugees, or “refugees” and “migrants,” unlocks the potential for political action.

The idea of unintended consequences of social action constitutes one of the core meta-assumptions of new economic sociology. Yet neither its US nor its European branch seem to make a direct statement about this. This state of affairs appears to be the result of various cumulative circumstances, such as the role played by the competition from other meta-assumptions which address similar or related issues and the rather general treatment of the unintended consequences within the field. This article takes a closer look and tries to establish whether the approach to the unintended in the US and European new economic sociologies is indeed so general. It concludes that the source of the low visibility of the unintended consequences as a fundamental problem for new economic sociology is not the fact that this is not granted proper systematization. The problem rather lies in the lack of awareness and cumulative knowledge about the unintended consequences as a main sociological problem that was already taken up in sociology.