Institute News

Winter Term 2023/24

Colloquium: Sharing knowledge? Epistemic configurations of public places of knowledge - museums, collections, archives, real world and urban laboratories

Goethe University's Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology's 2023-2024 seminar series addresses public places of collecting and curating knowledges. We are interested in how these places – in more or less virtual, physical, embodied spaces – configure the entities known. We invite contributors to discuss the politics of epistemic configurations across databases, collections, real world laboratories and museums. We are curious about intended and unintended political effects as well as the situated negotiation of such effects.

22.11.2023, 14:00-16:00 | SH 3.105:

I see something you don't see: Knowledge politics of digital infrastructures. Judith Blume (Collection Coordination, Frankfurt University Library), Matthias Harbeck (FID Social and Cultural Anthropology / University Library, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Ingmar Lippert (Institute for Cultural Anthropology and European Ethnology, University of Frankfurt) How do digital and digitizing infrastructures make knowledge visible or invisible, what is known through them, what is not, and with what consequences? We will discuss these questions in three cases: a wild museum between industry and autochthonous people in Germany, the presentation of collections and objects in various portals and databases of the Frankfurt University Collections, and the examination of the digitization of "difficult" materials (including those from colonial contexts) in the Specialized Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology. What visions of digital infrastructures can be developed from these three examples?