2004-05 Seminar
KNOWLEDGE AND ITS INSTITUTIONS
*To see a list lectures, art installations, and performances sponsored by this year's Seminar, please click here.*
Full schedule for ARTS IN APRIL, 2005 is here.
Co-Convened by Helen Solterer (Romance Studies) and Janet Ewald (History)
Fellows:
Katherine Castles, Graduate Student, Department of History
Roberto Dainotto, Assistant Professor of Italian, Department of Romance Studies
Lila Ellen Gray, Graduate Student, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Negar Mottahedeh, Assistant Professor of Literature, The Literature Program
Diane Nelson, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Department of Cultural Anthropology
Cheri Ross, Administrative Fellow
William Sexton, Metadata Architect/Programmer, Information Technology Services, Duke Libraries
Larry R. Todd, Professor of Music, Department of Music
Gennifer Weisenfeld, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, Department of Art and Art History
About the Topic:
"Knowledge and Its Institutions" offers great scope for reflection and relevance. As scholars, we both center our lives around our relationship to knowledge and work within institutions. The Faculty Seminar of the Franklin Humanities Institute itself is an institution of knowledge. We invite colleagues to join us, not only to pursue their individual projects but to commit to a collective process of knowledge in the making. Ultimately, we seek to become more aware of the changing presuppositions, functions, and potential of the humanities today.
We start with a working definition and some fundamental questions. By
institution, we mean people congregating to imagine and think together.
What, then, is the relationship between institutions and knowledge? Are
institutions necessary to create, transmit, and receive knowledge? How
can--and what kinds of--knowledge arise outside institutions?
As a group, we seek to develop three approaches to knowledge and its institutions
historically and geographically across different cultures.
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To examine critically what we experience and easily recognize as dominant
or ranking forms and structures.
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To discern alternatives, which scholars at the FHI Seminar might not so
easily recognize. To explore and experiment with such alternatives in the
seminar.
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To envisage a future for knowledge and its institutions.
The interlocking questions of who, where, and how inform each of these approaches.
Who participates in institutions of knowledge? Which individuals and groups
exert influence as authorities and seekers of knowledge? Here, for example,
we can think about public intellectuals and their worlds. Who among the
excluded have formed alternative routes to knowledge? Here, we can think
about people of particular gender, race, and sexuality. We also want to
include criteria of human age and ability/disability. What, for example,
do we gain when we consider people at the beginning of life as authorities
and seekers of knowledge? And those nearing the end of life? And the mentally
and physically handicapped? How does the “who” question shape
the creation and transmission of knowledge?
Where do institutions of knowledge appear? What are the social situations and physical sites of institutions of knowledge? Why did certain situations and sites–say, that of the universities which took shape in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe–win pride of place as institutions of knowledge? We still work within this walled structure. But people have always made other structures and found other places: city streets, the shade of a baobab tree, a playground, parlor, zoo, an amphitheater. Is it possible to have an institution of knowledge without a physical place? Is cyberspace, with its chat rooms and instant communication, an institutional space of knowledge? We invite seminar members to entertain other examples of alternate structures and places. Whether of a dominant or alternative institution, the “where” affects the creation and transmission of knowledge.
“How” is our most important and challenging question. How do institutions order, classify, and control knowledge? How do they make certain knowledge secret or esoteric? How do the languages of particular institutions facilitate or inhibit the circulation of knowledge? What do the practices and consequences of censorship tell us? We hope, however, also to consider alternative modes of creating and transmitting knowledge. How about making fictions, imagining, and playing? And how do people engage in these modes in or outside of institutions? This brings us to how people come to “know” through their bodies and emotions as well as how they gain knowledge through their minds. How have institutions dealt with this experiential knowing? How have they accommodated or failed to accommodate experiential knowing?
Finally, as we suggested in the opening lines of this description, participants in the Seminar create, transmit, and receive knowledge in the institutional framework of the Franklin Humanities Institute. In the coming year, we want to explore the challenges that it poses: Two large questions, perhaps even paradoxes, emerge here.
First, the Humanities Institute has established itself as interdisciplinary.
Yet we retain basic definitions of disciplines established centuries ago.
At this time when the notion of interdisciplinarity is constantly being
raised and ever in the process of being realized, we need to think about
the very categorizing and ordering of disciplines: the divisions among
arts, sciences, and other endeavors, e.g., new arts such as MRI; new sciences
enabled by the digital revolution.
Second, the Institute announces itself as a specifically Humanities Institute. But what distinguishes knowledge in the “humanities”–another centuries-old category--from other kinds of knowledge? What assumptions about being human and the humanities underlie the Franklin Humanities Institute itself? The question quickens when we consider fast-paced technological developments of the last several generations that are altering our notion of what is “human:” not only “artificial” intelligence, but also “artificial” forms of reproduction. Philosophers and activists have already crossed the human/animal divide. So, what happens to humanities knowledge as our sense of what is human shifts?
The 2004-2005 Seminar seeks to be collaborative, self-reflective, and experimental. As did previous Seminars, we will include members from the faculty of Arts and Sciences; and, as well as in previous years, one membership has been reserved for a representative of a professional school and one for a librarian. During the year, we will also be interacting with scholars not necessarily in Humanities departments but who are engaged with issues concerning the humanities. Recognizing and seeking to draw on the many exciting interdisciplinary initiatives currently under way at Duke and often sponsored by the Franklin Institute and broader community within the Franklin Center, we hope to gain the participation of scholars, artists, activists, and other thinkers in the Duke community beyond Arts and Sciences.