Production of Knowledge

Project Description

The question of what knowledge is acknowledged as relevant, legitimate, or useful is foundational (not only) in the field of upbringing and education and it is the centerpoint of diverse attempts at exclusion and usurpation. Important changes relevant to this field have ensued in the time since 1945. These changes continue to have effects to this day – and knowledge of them can be illuminative for contemporary developments. It therefore makes sense to ask which displacements, usurpations, and overlappings in the power relationship between science, politics, and profession can be determined, as well as how subject discipline and its determining thought collective were thereby changed.

The theoretical-methodological product expected from this inquiry will result from an intellectual-historical approach and educational-historical perspective. In light of the plasticity of the “history of knowledge” that has taken shape in the German-language sphere since the early 2000s, the editors nonetheless operate from a central premise: Science is understood as a culture and practice that is constructed and developed in complex interplay with other cultural and international fields of knowledge and action. This opens a broad field of research for the educational history of the Federal Republic of Germany, one which programmatically goes beyond the scope of the heretofore dominant constraint of attention to the production of knowledge at universities and its purportedly purely inherent dynamics. For example, the volume addresses systematically the previously neglected non-university research – among other things as a contrast to university research – and makes it accessible to the institutional memory of the discipline. This occurs, for instance, when the organization and production of knowledge at the DIPF | Leibniz Institute for Research and Information in Education and the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB) in their social contexts was examined.

Publication

Project Management

• Prof. Dr. Sabine Reh (BBF)
• Prof. Dr. Edith Glaser (Universität Kassel)
• Dr. Britta Behm (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/ Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg)
• Tilman Drope, M.A. (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen/BBF)

Project Details