Klaus-Tschira-Stiftung. - Mobilities of Knowledge

The Author(s) 2017

Heike Jns 1 , Michael Heffernan 2 and Peter Meusburger 3

Keywords

Wenn man sich zu den Gegenstnden selbst begibt, hlt man nichts anderes eher fr wahr, als bis man es selbst angeschaut hat, so mag der Weg vielleicht langsamer sein, aber er ist auch sicherer und reizender und der Stoff des Nachdenkens ebenso unerschpflich als die Menge der Gegenstnde in der Natur.

If one betakes to the things themselves, one does not accept anything else as truth unless one has looked at it oneself, so the journey may be slower, but it is also more secure and alluring and the intellectual nourishment equally inexhaustible as the amount of things in nature.

(Wilhelm von Humboldt to Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, 17 November 1788 quoted in Geier, , pp. 9394; translation by authors).

This book examines how the geographical mobility of people, practices, institutions, ideas, technologies, and things has impacted epistemic systems of knowledge. The pivotal role of such mobilities in the acquisition, exchange, and generation of knowledge is vividly exemplified by the well-known brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt, both of whom shaped cultural and intellectual life in eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe. Educated at home by private tutors in Berlin and nearby Tegel until their late teenage years, the Humboldt brothers studied at Frankfurt-on-Oder and Gttingen, where Wilhelm enrolled for law and Alexander for public finance, before the latter moved to Freiberg to continue his education in mineralogy and geology. During their time at university, the Humboldt brothers undertook separate European tours on which they met leading intellectuals, including the naturalist Georg Forster, veteran of James Cooks Pacific explorations. In 1789, Alexander toured the basalt landscapes of the Rhine, while Wilhelm witnessed the early days of the French Revolution in Paris , recording his impressions in a famous diary (Geier, ).

The travel experiences of the two brothers in this formative era had a discernible impact on their characters, interests, and subsequent mobilities. Alexander became one of the most accomplished and esteemed scientific travelers of the age, exploring remote landscapes and environments, especially in Latin America, and transforming the emerging disciplines of geography and the natural sciences (Rupke, ). Together the Humboldt brothers epitomize the important role of geographical mobility for education and learning , and how knowledge production in different academic fields, or, more generally, the production of different types of knowledge, implies varying degrees of mobile and sedentary professional lives.

The essays in this volume follow in the footsteps of the Humboldt brothers by examining the role of geographical mobilities in the production and circulation of knowledge in different historical and geographical contexts. We define mobility as an entitys change of position in a specific system (Bhr, ). Three key research questions inform the individual analyses in this book : What role has geographical mobility played for the production and dissemination of knowledge in different historical, geographical, and sectoral contexts? How have different types of knowledge, as well as related practices and products, been transferred between individuals, institutions, and places? And to what extent have knowledge and its mediators, as well as places of origin and destinations, been transformed through geographical mobility and shaped by varying social, cultural, economic, and political contexts?

The contributions to this book build on research about the creation, mobility, reception, and geographical distribution of different types of knowledge in hitherto largely separate fields of inquiry, such as organization theory, the history and geography of science , the history of geography, migration studies, and the geographies of education. They specifically add detailed case studies and conceptual considerations to existing research in the geographies of science (e.g., Driver, ).

Drawing on the work of the sociologist John Urry () remarked critically that the mobilities paradigm is so obviously about human movement over space and between places that geographers take this subject matter for granted (p. 143).

The case studies included in this book can usefully be situated within Urrys ().

Drawing on these insights, we suggest adding a sixth dimension to Urrys () has argued that the historically and ongoing underrepresentation of Hispanic university students and academics in comparison to their non-Hispanic White peers at the University of New Mexico, United States, can be explained by the identity struggle most of them, and especially those from rural areas, face when adjusting to Anglo-American educational practices and standards that tend to be at odds with their Hispanic cultural ideals, practices, and value systems. In both cases, the geographical movement of concepts and institutionsto Hong Kong and to New Mexicothus devalued local cultural experiences and created the need for immobile local populations to adapt to the practices, knowledges, and values of a mobile system of educational standards representing a largely unfamiliar cultural context to them.

The suggestion to extend Urrys ().