Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Gender as a Category of Knowledge

 

This working group worked with one of the research training group’s main fields of interest: the category ‘knowledge.’ The shared starting point of its work was the local, social, and historical connection between knowledge and its production, which the social sciences and humanities have developed a consensus about since the so-called ‘cultural turn.’ 

 

Depending on the application, objects of knowledge and concepts are: understood as products of the their respective historical and cultural constellations of discourses and practices (i.e. Foucault;) or material-discursive apparatuses (i.e. Haraway); analyzed as connections of heterogeneous human and non-human components of a network (z.B. Callion, Latour); and viewed through the respective standpoint of its production as it is intertwined with power and politics (z.B. Harding, Smith, Bordieu). 

 

The working group is not interested in an ultimate clarification of the definition of ‘knowledge,’ as such attempts to establish set definition are often tied to normative borders. Rather, the group focused on analyzing these borders and demarcations, and on the contextualization and historization of different ‘forms of knowledge’, their cultural codifications, and their consequences, as well as their often power-laden interrelations. Thereby the political meaning of knowledge -- understood as an accompanying, inscribed disposition of power, hierarchy, and gender -- is to be brought into the foreground. 

 

So how is what does and does not count as knowledge determined? And by whom? What is the relationship between the definition of ‘knowledge’ and ‘non-knowledge’ and the formation of academic disciplines? What is different about the knowledge of midwives, historians, and queer activists and researchers? What belongs to the ‘canon’ of an academic discipline and why? What influence has classification systems and infrastructures had on the production of knowledge? How does the catalogue of AIDS symptoms change in terms of presentation, quality and quantity of the illness? 

 

What consequences does it have when search engines take dimensions of semantic meaning into account, which however fall back on specific conventions? Finally, the group will also examine resistance tactics and practices of (knowledge) subversion, as well as possibilities of reinterpretation, rejection or even new constructions of categories of knowledge. 

 

After its founding in early 2010, the group gathered an overview of various theoretical approaches to the topic ‘knowledge’ and established an accompanying bibliography. In the coming meetings the aforementioned questions will be re-located in group members’ the individual projects.