Exactly one week ago, the 9th Making of the Humanities conference kicked off. What followed were three days of excellent panels and lectures under the theme ‘Unfolding Disciplines’.
Scholars of the Lund Center for the History of Knowledge invited me to join their panel on ‘The humanities and the public sphere in post-war Western Europe’. While the history of the modern humanities traditionally focuses on the university and academic disciplines – and, increasingly, on interdisciplinary constellations – this panel set out to investigate the public circulation of knowledge, that is: the way humanistic knowledge functions outside the university and in interaction with press, radio, television and the wider book market.
Anton Jansson spoke about the way humanistic knowledge was shaped in educational initiatives of the Swedish Labour Movement in the postwar years, Ragni Svensson took us to several independent Scandinavian socialist book cafes from the 1970’s and high lightened these places as ‘alternative knowledge sites’, and in my own lecture I took the opportunity to look at the literary magazine Merlyn (1962-1966) which was an important mediator for New Critics’ insights into Dutch literary studies and in a way illustrates the process of knowledge transfer from the public to the university (stimulated in that time by the rise of paperbacks). Finally, Johan Östling introduced the concept of a ‘public arena of knowledge’ and analyzed the broadcasting show ‘Ask Lund’ arguing that in the newest form of media (in this case: television) classical humanistic knowledge could thrive.
Studying these examples of public knowledge circulation poses important questions on the way the societal relevance of the humanities can be studied. To mention just a few of the questions that came up during the panel: What are the public spheres of relevance in the postwar years and how did they develop? What are its gatekeepers, both visible and invisible? What is the role of alternative sites of knowledge (then and now), how do they interact with academic disciplines and vica versa? And… when does humanistic knowledge actually stop to be part of the humanities?
I’m looking forward reading more on the public circulation of knowledge and the concept of ‘knowledge arena’s’ in the upcoming issue of History of Humanities guest edited by Östling and colleagues!