Ruhr-Universität Bochum

Beckmanns Hof/Botanical Garden Strätlingshof

06 - 08 June 2013

| Academy of Korean Studies Overseas Leading University of Korean Studies Project: „The Circulation of Knowledge and the Dynamics of Transformation“

Freie Universität Berlin/Ruhr Universität Bochum Consortium

 

Integration Processes in the Circulation of Knowledge: Cases from Korea and Beyond

The aim of this conferences, as well as of the cooperation with FU Berlin of which they are part, is to look at the exchanges and ensuing transformations of items of knowledge (especially when these exchanges take place across perceived „cultural“ or „national“ borders), as well as at cultural and epistemic changes that may result from these processes. The present conference focusses on the secondary transformations of knowledge that accompany or ensue after the initial transferral, i.e. cognitive and communicative processes through which new knowledge and its carriers are related to or integrated into existing (canons of) knowledge. The tools and mechanisms of dealing with new knowledge may include interpretive adaptation, dissection, selection and reassemblage, reduction and amplification, as well as blending with existing cognitive structures. Thematically, the conference deals with a wide range of fields of knowledge, ranging from the literary and religious to the technical and scientific domain. Contributions are united methodologically, however, by keeping an eye not only on the message but also the medium: the nature of the carrier of knowledge (its genre or its material form) may well predispose the ways in which knowledge is reconfigured and exerts formative powers on its new context. Therefore, presentations dealing with the textual tradition in a wide variety of genres are complemented by papers approaching the issue from the perspective of material objects (ritual utensils, mechanical tools, weapons, etc.) as both objects and carriers of knowledge.

 

Please find the conference schedule here.