Maria Simonsen (Aalborg University) and Laura Skouvig (University of Copenhagen) have received funding from the Independent Research Fund Denmark for a network: Objects of Knowledge: Advancing the History of Knowledge. The network runs from February 2025 and ends in October 2027.

The network gathers Danish established scholars as scholars in the beginning of their career from universities, museums and The Royal Danish Library to conduct a multifaceted exploration of what objects of knowledge are and how they provide a new and intellectually stimulating framework for the history of knowledge. Through collaborative workshops  the network explores how the historical contingency of the emergence, the co-creation and the production of knowledge in everyday life is closely linked to objects. We argue that this has potential for advancing the history of knowledge further.

Objects, tangible as non-tangible, are pivotal to the network. The participants represent research environments that provide various understandings and approaches to objects and their relations to knowledge. Regardless of whether they are objects of scientific inquiry, everyday objects, tangible or digitized objects, they are closely linked to the creation, circulation, and consumption of knowledge in daily practices. Objects are ambigous. Are they concrete, physical objects, or abstract objects that more resemble ideas and concepts? We contend that knowledge is formed and performed in the borderland between materiality, form, genre, and content. In daily life, people create, consume and understand knowledge with objects e.g. books, algorithms, statistics or the underwater world, and we will discuss to what extent objects themselves do something and perform knowledge. Methodologically, we explore so-called ‘object biographies’  as a means for discerning the trajectories of objects of knowledge in everyday life.

The interdisciplinary scope of the network and its combination of multiple scholarly traditions and the practical experience of museums and research libraries pinpoint the mutability and circulation of knowledge objects. Our ambition is to explore how and when an object becomes an object of knowledge in everyday life.Hence, objects are a prism for understanding how and why knowledge historically has had different forms, has been used and produced by different actors, and how it has circulated in antiquity, early-modern and modern cultures and societies.

The network concludes with a confence in spring 2027 entitled Objects in the History of Knowledge.

Contact:

Laura Skouvig laura.skouvig@hum.ku.dk

Maria Simonsen simonsen@dps.aau.dk