"Popular Cultures of History and Knowledge" Working Group

In our times of increasing networking of knowledge, seemingly unlimited storage of information, and the resulting changes in the structure of our communication, the topic of cultures of knowledge is increasingly becoming a focus of public interest and cultural studies research. This raises the question as to how knowledge is produced and absorbed, also and particularly in view of its conveyal through popular culture across the boundaries of individual societies. The growing diversity of media is increasingly leading us away from the so-called top-down model toward a mixing of the categories of producer and recipient. Knowledge is thus formed in a process of exchange at several locations and is in this regard dynamic and flexible.
The working group is devoted to analyzing the changing status of knowledge in societies. A key issue is the differentiation of the various instances and protagonists involved in this process and the interactions between them. Since we understand the modern cultures of knowledge of the present as well as those of the 19th century as media phenomena, one of the main topics of our meetings is the conceptionalization of knowledge by media, especially with regard to popular and mass culture.
In this connection, we place special emphasis on cultures of knowledge conveyed through media. A culture of history – according to Jörn Rüsen the efforts of a society “to secure for itself a stable identity by means of collective memories, to maintain its historical identity” (Rüsen 1989, my translation), or in the less abstract terms of Klaus Füßmann the “production, distribution, and assimilation of historical knowledge in a society” (Füßmann 1994, my translation) – is an important part of cultures of knowledge that structures collective identities, provides orientation in the present, and provides indications of mentalities and societal conditions.
The group includes doctoral candidates and postdoctoral researchers from a range of disciplines – history, Slavic studies, Scandinavian studies, archaeology, Anglo-American cultural studies, media education, auxiliary sciences of history, and cultural and social anthropology. Its members consist, among others, of the members of the junior research group of the DFG Research Group 875 “History in Popular Cultures of Knowledge.”