The Location of Knowledge: A Mellon CDI Conference

The Centre for Disciplinary Innovation (CDI) is part of a four-year project (initially 2008-2011; renewed for 2011-15) funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation. The CDI is a focus for collaboration and innovation at the graduate level and beyond, complementing other activities initiated within the CRASSH themes of Cultural Transmission, Disciplinary Change, The Future University, Cultures and Politics of the Transregional, and for 2013-15, The Location of Knowledge. This general theme encompasses how knowledge is formulated within disciplines, regions, practices; how it changes under pressure from different forces — religious conversion, new technologies, say. Under this general rubric and within our Mellon Centre for Disciplinary Innovation, this conference explores the notion of understanding itself. Each session will look at how understanding focuses on a particular “location” and is formulated through that location: so “understanding (through) things” will investigate how things are understood, how understanding is formulated with and through things, and what the relation between these two sorts of understanding is. And similarly with “voice”, “body” and “concepts”. We have invited four of the world’s top scholars to investigate these problems. Simon Schaffer is best known for his work with Stephen Shapin on “Leviathan and the Airpump” and is undoubtedly one of the world’s leading historian of science. John Forrester is one of the foremost historians of psychoanalysis. Peter de Bolla, expert in the 18th century is a celebrated theorist of art, literature and culture. Sarah Franklin, Cambridge’s new professor of sociology, is a brilliant exponent of how reproductive technologies are changing our relation to the body. To help focus discussion we have also brought in four further world experts: Akeel Bilgrami, philosopher from Columbia, New York; Sally Shuttleworth, historian of literature and psychological theory from Oxford: Clifford Siskin, Director of The Re:Enlightenment Project who is currently a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at CRASSH, and Clare Pettitt, Professor of Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture at King’s College London. Papers will be short and to the point; responses robust; and there will be plenty of time, as CRASSH usually demands, for intense discussion.