Centre for Global Knowledge Studies (gloknos)

Annual Lecture Series

Book Launches

'Cum Panis' Seminars

Festival Events

Online Exhibitions

The ‘Travels of the Artic’ online exhibition curated by Dr Anna Gielas (University of Cambridge), launched on gloknos‘ website on 1 August 2021.

This online exhibition presents historical illustrations of the Arctic excerpted from print artefacts (periodicals, books and postcards), highlighting the cultural and technological constructedness of the far North during the long nineteenth century (1789-1914). In other words, the exhibition focuses on Arctic images as representations of matter and as matter in itself. With this dual focus, the overall goal of the exhibition is to invite reflections on how today’s cultural as well as technological socialisation influences our mental images and understandings of the Arctic regions.

Enter the Exhibition

Reading Groups

Summer Schools

‘The Science and Politics of Food in Human History‘:
Open Knowledge Summer School 2019

The Open Knowledge Summer School in the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities was a fully-funded,Widening Participation, multi-subject residential event hosted in August 2019 by gloknos at CRASSH, in Cambridge . The deadline for applications has now closed and we are not taking submissions of interest. 

Transdisciplinary Initiatives

The Transdisciplinary Initiative currently hosts four projects: you can find more information using the links below.

Objects

Objects is a modular project developed in collaboration with the Cambridge Global Food Security Interdisciplinary Research Centre. It aims to foster innovative transdisciplinary research by furthering our understanding of the scientific, historical, and social dimensions of food and agriculture.

Starting in 2018-19 with funding from the Isaac Newton Trust, the European Research Council, and the TIGR2ESS project, Objects has assembled multiple small groups of researchers from the natural, physical, and social sciences and well as the humanities, to discuss specific objects (ecofacts or artefacts) relating to global food security. You can watch the full series online now.

Leonardo

Leonardo is a project developed in collaboration with the Material Balance Research Group at the Politecnico di Milano. Through it we explore the structures and modalities of innovation and technical imaginaries of the past and future.

Global Epistemics

gloknos and publisher Rowman & Littlefield International (RLI) have launched a new, transdisciplinary book series on Global Epistemics.

Global Epistemics was founded and will be edited by gloknos’s Founding Director Inanna Hamati-Ataya, with RLI’s Isobel Cowper-Coles as its Commissioning Editor. The Global Epistemics book series is an important milestone for the ARTEFACT project, one of whose objectives is to develop interdisciplinary research on global knowledge studies. As gloknos‘s core academic dissemination arm, the series will foster, support, and promote empirically grounded and theoretically ambitious work that draws on advances across disciplines and speaks to audiences across and beyond disciplinary boundaries.

The series will be integrated into gloknos‘s research and dissemination structures, and will be managed by gloknos‘s core research team with the guidance of a substantial and multidisciplinary Editorial Review Board including world-leading experts in their academic fields and in the global organisation and circulation of knowledge.

The Right to Science

The Right to Science project is an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration led by a group of researchers in the sciences, humanities, social sciences, and law to further our understanding of how to protect and implement the right to science as a universal cultural right.

We all have a human right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress (the Right to Science [RtS]). The right has its origins in Article 27 of the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in the wake of World War II. In 1966, the UN turned these commitments into binding obligations under international law. The implication is that, just as governments are expected to respect the rights to, say, freedom of speech and due process, so they must also adopt measures to respect and ensure the RtS. The existence of this right is important for researchers and society. It adds a legal and moral dimension to a range of fundamental issues, including scientific freedom, funding, and policy, as well as access to data, materials, and knowledge. Yet, despite its potential for furthering science and human rights causes, the RtS has not received the attention it deserves.

Visitors

Matheus Duarte (August – December 2022)

Matheus Duarte is a post-doctoral research fellow (2020–2025) at the University of St Andrews, with the Wellcome-funded project The Global War against the Rat and the Epistemic Emergence of Zoonosis (grant number 217,988/Z/19/Z). In the project, he investigates the social and scientific history of rat-catching practices developed in Brazil, the USA, and in the French and British Empires during the first half of the twentieth century, and how these practices transformed the rat into a global actor on plague studies and intervention.

Matheus holds a PhD in the History of Science from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS- Paris). His main research interests lie in the intersection of History of Science, History of Medicine, and Global History. During his visiting fellowship at gloknos, Matheus Duarte will be exploring the emergence of rural plague in Latin America between the 1920s-50s, with a focus on Brazil and Argentina, discussing how this idea interacted with nation-building projects and public health modernisation as well as with global studies on rats and wild rodents.

Max Hancock (June – August 2022)

Max Hancock is a graduate student at the University of Chicago’s Committee on International Relations. His training is in IR, and current research focuses on topics in intellectual history, political economy, world systems, and the history of science. Currently Max is most interested in hybrids, human-animal relations, and nature-society dichotomies in the history of global capitalism. He is currently working on an article-length piece on biological computers and the making of world markets in the 1960s.

While in Cambridge, Max will be working on a paper revolving around several mid-century thinkers and actors and their work on biological computing. Max is working to situate his investigation at the point where the history of human knowledges, nonhuman intelligence, world systems, and economic thought collide.

Maria Birnbaum (Visiting 2021-2022, at gloknos, CRASSH and POLIS at the University of Cambridge)

Maria is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Bern. She received her PhD in International Relations from the European University Institute (EUI) and works in the fields of Global Politics, Religious Studies, and Colonial History. Her work studies the relationship between diversity and order with a particular focus on religion and global politics.

Maria Birnbaum is currently part of the project “Religious Conflicts and Coping Strategies” at the University of Bern where she is working on a series of articles exploring the conditions and limits of liberal diversity governance (“The costs of recognition“), and the entangled history and politics of Israel and Pakistan.

She is also finalising a book manuscript titled “Becoming Recognizable” analysing arguments for the recognition of religion in global politics. Here she shows how attempts to conceptualise, institutionalise, and manage social and religious difference in South Asia and the Middle East shaped the state-making processes of Pakistan and Israel and the conflicts following them. She argues that recognition along the lines of religion – in terms of border making, representation, or demography – came with considerable costs.

In her new project, ”Histories and Hierarchies of Ignorance“, Maria Birnbaum studies cases where political and legal unintelligibility are conceived as forms of power rather than forms of suppression.

Maarten Meijer (October – December 2021)

Maarten is a doctoral candidate at the Department of International Relations at the University of Groningen. His doctoral research focusses on the history of soil as an institution of geo-biopolitical governance, drawing on histories of infrastructure, technology, (soil) sciences, colonialism, and fascism. More broadly, he is interested in political and environmental thought, cosmologies of the end, and philosophies of translation and diplomacy.

In addition to his academic work, Maarten is a co-creator of an award-winning contribution to the design contest ‘Giving a Voice to the North Sea’, organised by the Dutch NGO ‘the Embassy of the North Sea’. He currently works together with Studio Inscape on a serious game in which players negotiate on the changing future of the Oosterschelde region for the Water Disaster Museum in the province of Zeeland.

Helle Porsdam (September – November 2021)

Helle is a Leverhulme Visiting Professor, at gloknos and CRASSH through Michaelmas term 2021-22. She is Professor of Law and Humanities at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law (CIS), Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen. She teaches American Culture and History in the SAXO Department, Faculty of the Humanities, University of Copenhagen, and Law and Humanities, the Culture and History of Human Rights and Cultural Rights at the Faculty of Law. She also holds a UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights.

Helle did her PhD in American Studies at Yale University, has been a Liberal Arts Fellow twice at the Harvard Law School, as well as a fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, and the University of Munich.

During her stay at the Centre for Global Knowledge Studies, Helle will work on aspects of the Right to Science that concern knowledge production and the conditions under which such production takes place. These include scientific freedom and responsibility, and also science diplomacy.

Carolina Gerwin (2018)

Carolina is a Visiting Researcher at gloknos and CRASSH in 2018. She has completed a Bachelors Degree in International Studies at Leiden University in The Hague, Netherlands, including a semester spent abroad at University College London.

During her visit, Carolina worked closely with gloknos’s core team on her current research project. Specifically, Carolina is very interested in exploring how new media and communication technologies are transforming the way that knowledge is produced and circulated in contemporary societies, and is currently investigating the similarities and differences between online platforms and older technological innovations of knowledge-transmission, such as the printing press and the book.

Webcasts

Watch the ‘On the Creation of (Global) Western Spaces‘ webcast series via YouTube.

Watch the ‘Epistemologies of Land‘ webcast series via YouTube.

Watch ‘Covid-19 as a Zoonotic Disease‘ via YouTube.

Workshops

'Agrarian Orders and Transformations' Research Group

The aim of the Agrarian Orders and Transformations research group is to foster cross-disciplinary discussions and collaborations on the present and future of agrarian life, with a special interest in patterns of continuity and rupture that characterise current and emerging trends in our food-production systems, the social organisation of agricultural life, and the normative orders that underscore and drive its regulation and transformation.

More information about future activities and opportunities will be made available soon.

Convenor: Inanna Hamati-Ataya

'Finding the Future' Research Group

More information about Finding the Future activities and opportunities will be made available soon.

Convenors:

Amanda Rees | Iwan Rhys Morus

'Global Epistemological Politics of Religion' Research Group

The Global Epistemological Politics of Religion research group explores concepts and debates informing contemporary social and political theory and practice concerning the dynamics and relations between religion, politics and order. Through the detailed study of various cases we explore the histories and political logics of various attempts to conceptualise and institutionalise social, religious and cultural difference, including the rule of law, the practices of knowledge and non-knowledge, and the recognition and protection of religious minorities. Questions to be discussed include: How does modern law and political practice regulate the spaces within which individuals and groups live out their cultural and religious lives? What are the histories and politics of modern constructs of religion in relation to the nation, technology and across different networks? The group is explicitly interdisciplinary drawing social and political theory, global politics, anthropology, history, and sociology of religion, and law.

Convenor:

Maria Birnbaum

'Neurodivergent Socialities' Undergraduate Network

The Neurodivergent Socialities research group is an interdisciplinary undergraduate student network.

The neurodiversity movement encompasses those with conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, etc., as well as (more recently and somewhat controversially) those with chronic mental health conditions such as bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, long-term depression, and others. It tends to be radically accepting of self-diagnoses and critical of conventional psychopathological frameworks. Mainstream Western discourse around neurodiversity frames neurodivergent experiences in highly medicalised terms of individual deficit. This precludes the exploration of neurodiversity as a normal aspect of human cognitive variation and as fundamentally embedded in social and political structures. Whilst remaining cognisant of the challenges of disability, this research group will contribute to de-pathologising neurodiversity by investigating questions around how neurodivergent states afford particular ways of relating to the world.

This research network will aim to start with relatively informal discussions and then move on to reading groups, workshops, blog posts, speaker events, and other initiatives as the group deems appropriate. An indicative (but not required or expected) reading list is available via our website.

Convenor:

Inika Murkumbi

'The Right to Science' Research Group

We all have a human right to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress (the Right to Science [RtS]). The right has its origins in Article 27 of the United Nation’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted in the wake of World War II. In 1966, the UN turned these commitments into binding obligations under international law. The implication is that, just as governments are expected to respect the rights to, say, freedom of speech and due process, so they must also adopt measures to respect and ensure the RtS. The existence of this right is important for researchers and society. It adds a legal and moral dimension to a range of fundamental issues, including scientific freedom, funding, and policy, as well as access to data, materials, and knowledge. Yet, despite its potential for furthering science and human rights causes, the RtS has not received the attention it deserves.

This research group will work towards:

1) a deeper understanding of the right to science, both legally and conceptually
2) activating the right to science in practice
3) making the right to science a better known human right.

Activities planned at this early stage include monthly zoom meetings and book launches for our Cambridge University edited volume, The Right to Science: Then and Now which will be published in late November or early December.

Convenors:

Helle Porsdam | Sebastian Porsdam Mann | Christine Mitchell

'Science and its Others' Research Group

The Science and its Others: Histories of Ethno-Science group studies the changing relationship between scientific knowledge and what is variously called local, ‘indigenous’ or ‘native’ knowledges. Our starting point is the eighteenth-century travel instructions that asked naturalists to routinely record indigenous names and knowledge. We explore economic botany, ethnography and other strands of nineteenth-century natural history relying on systematic surveys of national and colonial territories, and the eventual consolidation of ethno-disciplines in the twentieth century. We are interested in the putative shifts towards increasingly global awareness and calls for the incorporation of ‘traditional’ knowledge in political and scientific discourses. Fundamental questions we want to address include: under which historical and epistemological conditions did indigenous forms of knowledge undergo a revaluation by western scientists – from the colonial and derogative notion of ‘savage’ to what is now called ‘ethnoscience’? What forms of credit and intellectual property organised the intersection of indigenous and scientific knowledge? What consequences, if any, did these intersections have for the demarcation between science and non-science? And what impact, in turn, did the exposure to ‘science’ have on the self-understanding and identity of local knowledge communities?

Convenors:

Harriet Mercer | Staffan Müller-Wille | Raphael Uchôa

'Taste and Knowledge' Research Group

The Taste and Knowledge research group seeks to understand the strange fate of taste as a form of knowledge production intermingled with value judgments.

Taste is central to a wide range of practices used to assay objects and materials for quality and value, from the taste panels used by food producers to the judgments performed by experts in gemstones, wine, art, and coffee. Indeed, taste plays a central but often unrecognised role in the modern economy, determining the value and profitability of countless products.

At one and the same time, however, taste is widely regarded as an intrinsically unreliable way of knowing about the world, subject to the vagaries of both individual taste and individual bodies. Across a huge range of fields, from the sciences to the most obvious objects of taste judgment – food criticism and production – taste is regarded with suspicion. Widespread efforts are afoot to replace or supplement it with apparently more objective practices of quantification and measurement.

We want to understand how and why taste came to have this ambiguous status – at once central to our understanding of quality and value, but at the same time maligned as subjective and inaccurate.

Convenors:

Marieke Hendriksen | Alex Wragge-Morley

The Team

gloknos Core Team

• Director Inanna Hamati-Ataya
• Research Project Administrator Zeynep Kacmaz-Milne
• Research Associate Felix Anderl (left August 2020)
• Research Associate Matt Holmes (left February 2022)

gloknos is home to a wide variety of associate members, institutional partners, research group leaders, and other affiliates – you can see their profiles via our website. We are also grateful for the careful guidance and support of our Advisory Board members.