Knowledge Actors has been published. It is the third and final book in our trilogy on the history of knowledge.

About Knowledge Actors

In Knowledge Actors, we bring knowledge actors to the fore. Gathering researchers with diverse backgrounds and expertise, the guiding questions in this book centre on agency. Who were knowledge actors in different historical settings? What did it mean to be knowledgeable, to use or have knowledge, to produce or circulate it? Who contributed to knowledge processes and how—and what have the obstacles and constraints been?

The first volume in our trilogy, Circulation of Knowledge (2018), explored knowledge in motion and how it potentially changed as it moved between genres, geographies, and social contexts. In the new field of the history of knowledge, emerging as it did in the 2010s, the circulation of knowledge became a popular concept, but it was used with different meanings and risked becoming a vague buzzword. Our ambition with the book was to show how circulation could be a fruitful analytical framework, opening a broader understanding of the different processes of knowledge. In the second volume, Forms of Knowledge (2020), our aim was to expand the concept of knowledge itself. We showed how various forms of knowledge played a fundamental role in society and in people’s lives throughout history. Systematic, scientific, and rational knowledge had been crucial in many settings, but so had many other forms of knowledge.

In these two previous volumes on the history of knowledge, questions related to actors and agency have been of indirect analytical importance, more because of the perspective we adopted than otherwise. The concept of circulation, for example, could help uncover the full extent of knowledge processes and point us at types of actors not usually ascribed significance. In a similar way, the broadening of the concept of knowledge in our second volume brought new groups and individuals into focus. Knowledge actors have so far been an important but unarticulated analytical category in our work on the history of knowledge.

Knowledge Actors stresses the importance of historical actors and re-engages with their actions from fresh perspectives. This volume thus fosters a larger discussion among historians about the role of knowledge actors. Do we want individuals and networks to take centre stage in our historical narratives? And if so, which knowledge actors do we want to highlight and how best to conduct our research? What are the potential pitfalls of following an actor-centric path?

Open access

All three volumes are available open access:

Circulation of Knowledge (2018): 

https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/36167357/Circulation_of_Knowledge.pdf

Forms of Knowledge (2020): 

https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/76263844/Forms_of_Knowledge.pdf

Knowledge Actors (2023): 

https://lucris.lub.lu.se/ws/portalfiles/portal/152543329/Knowledge_Actors_OA.pdf