Carl-Filip Smedberg will start his new project “Constructing the Un/Educated: Social Hierarchisation in the Rise of the Knowledge Society, c. 1968–1990” at the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge during the fall of 2023, where he will be employed to explore the history of the knowledge society. Describing society in terms of the division between “the educated” and “the uneducated” is entirely commonplace today, as present in social science research and think tanks as in policy and broader media debate. Yet such a notion is hardly self-evident. The project historicises the emergence of this influential educational divide and analyses what effects it had within political discussion and on ways of conceptualising societal futures. It does so by examining the divide’s discursive construction in the intersecting discussions of the future and education in Sweden between 1968 and 1990, a period coalescent with the idea that society was transitioning to a post-industrial knowledge society. The principal fault line in such discussions was education levels, whereby a new upper class – the highly educated – would take over, while the uneducated would form a new underclass.

The project examines the formation of this division via three empirical areas: debates about the future, adult education, and qualification levels of the workforce. The project develops theoretical tools to study this process through the lens of educationalisation of the social, meaning how society increasingly came to be described in educational terms. A second theoretical lens is classificatory temporalities, that is, how classifications shape societal perceptions of time. In doing so, the project will contribute with new knowledge about this most decisive dividing line within the knowledge society, and in extension, our present moment.

Carl-Filip Smedberg’s main research areas concern the production and circulation of class knowledge through the prism of social taxonomies. He defended his doctoral dissertation, Klassriket (Uppsala universitet, 2022), on the history of an influential 20^th century Swedish class taxonomy, at the Department of History of Science and Ideas, Uppsala University. Recent publication includes “Class Divisions in Use: The Swedish Social Group Taxonomy as Difference Technology, 1911–1970”, Contemporary European History (2023), and Public History in Action: Past and Present Practices of Making History Public (Opuscula Historica Upsaliensia, 2023), edited together with Armel Cornu and Sarah Vorminder.