EXC 270 Asia and Europe Knowledge Systems (Research Area C)

Speaker: Joachim Kurtz
Deputy Speaker: William S. Sax

This Research Area broadened its vision from its focus on health and the environment in the first funding period to a wider interest in multiple forms of knowledge production in the second. Specifically, it addressed not only the question of how knowledge in its various manifestations – discursive,  tacit, and embodied – is implemented, but also how it is generated, circulated, contested and defended in the fields of health, environment and other areas of enquiry dealing with the human and non-human worlds. The aim was thus to augment its earlier focus on practice in the first funding period with an explicit emphasis on theory in the second. Conventional scholarship sharply distinguishes between natural,  social, and human sciences, and the University encodes this distinction in its various faculties: a division of labour that has itself had a remarkably successful global career. However, some of the most interesting contemporary intellectual approaches question precisely these taken-for-granted distinctions. Research Area C studied them reflexively from a transcultural standpoint by examining, for example, how the Western-cum-cosmopolitan division between nature and culture has interacted with other forms of knowledge, in Asia and elsewhere. This it has done by suppressing, transforming or appropriating them and merging with them to create new epistemologies that have reshaped practices, institutions and discourses, and co-produced new forms of knowledge.