Art in Education – Treasures Within and Treasures Between Us

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Arts and Research is a collection of articles based on selected papers presented at the conference Art in Education held at Oslo Metropolitan university in august 2019. Our goal with the conference was to create a widely based international venue for exploring the many ways in which art becomes meaningful and powerful through ways of teaching and arts promotion. A key intention was to include both artists, academics and teachers and to stimulate encounters that cross conventional disciplinary barriers. The two partners organizing the conference were Kulturtanken: Arts for Young Audiences Norway, and the Faculty of Education at Oslo Metropolitan University. The mobilisation of both the artistic and scholarly networks of these two organizations laid the grounds for three days of stimulating interaction, art experiences and discussions

‘Baltic catacombs.’ Translating corpisanti catacomb relic-sculptures between Rome, Polish Livonia, and the Lithuanian Grand Duchy circa 1750-1800

This article offers a first study of the traffic of corpisanti catacomb relic-sculptures between Rome and sites in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Polish Livonia in the decades just before and during the Age of Partition (c. 1750-1800). The article firstly frames an overview of current knowledge on corpisanti more broadly against cases in Livonia and the Grand Duchy. It secondly provides a clearinghouse of secondary and primary source evidence on this topic, with particular attention to providing previously largely unpublished or under-studied texts pertaining to corpisanti cults in the north in translation, included as appendices. This article also presents a study in methods of collaborative scholarship in the pandemic era, investigating across distinct genres of source materials and material and artistic cultural heritage objects accessed via scholarly networks both in the field and online, representing historic sites and institutions in present-day Italy, Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Organising Academia Online

Research on organisational arrangements of scholarly networks in both e-learning and e-research is located at the intersection of different theoretical justifications and developmental contexts such as organisational theory, computer science, education science and media informatics. However, there is still a lack of research on the organisational context of e-learning arrangements and its impact on collaboration in academic communities. E-learning research shows that the integration of electronic media in scientific communities negatively impacts their effectiveness and causes conflicts within communities. Research networks however are far less investigated as there is not direct didactic focus on how to collaborate. Recent theories on organisational design, virtual organisations and governance provide concepts for organising e-collaboration more effectively. Managerial instruments such as direct control of results and behaviours need to be supplemented or even replaced by concepts of social control; typically trust and confidence become the central mechanisms for the new forms of inter- and intra-organisational coordination. This paper starts with concepts. Then, to exemplify the organisational coordination mechanisms in scholarly e-communities, the authors critically discuss and reflect on these organisational arrangements and managerial concepts for two higher education portals and one research network in Germany. The conclusion is that, just as previous research has confirmed for educational networks, governance within academic networks relies heavily on the functionality of social and communicative forms of control.

On the road: The novice munshi’s view of inter-imperial North India

This article analyses the diary entries made by a Persographic secretary (munshī), Aḥmad ʿAlī, who was employed by a retiring East India Company official to write an account of the journey they made together in 1780 across North India from Lucknow to the Mughal imperial capital in Delhi and back. Much of the landscape that they traversed—including a cluster of qasbahs, river passes, forests and fields—was formerly governed by a confederacy of Rohilla Afghans from 1737 to 1774. By 1780, however, this region was marked by the absence of well-defined, enduring state structures and witnessed an abundance of overlapping political claims. Under such conditions, Aḥmad ʿAlī, a novice secretary from this region who lacked access to major scholarly networks or courtly circles, found himself uniquely placed to observe and document the micro-level political and historical changes that he had lived through. Unlike his courtly counterparts, he witnessed transformations at a remove from both imperial politics and the regional courts that had developed through the eighteenth century. Rather than to a state or a single political project, his locus of service was aligned with the world of independent military entrepreneurs and their households, which were strewn across a region that he knew well. Questioning the view that secretaries were primarily cyphers of courtly culture or bureaucratic imperatives, the following pages demonstrate that while Aḥmad ʿAlī served his individual employer, he could imagine politics and history outside the constraints that came with corporate political affiliations, as a figure who was new to the work of secretarial penmanship and a seasoned bearer of textured regional knowledge.

Conclusion

This chapter provides a conclusion by extracting main theoretical lessons and developing a typology of creative social knowledge that emerges from the intersection of different ways of combining theory, methods, and data in social scientific scholarship and beyond. After further expanding on the concept of the theory–method–data triad, it presents a broader framework that can better grasp variation in the micro- and meso-level processes of knowledge production in the human sciences. The chapter argues that scholarly networks emerge at the intersection of theory, data, and methods. It also talks about a typology of networks and concrete examples that specify how and when theory, data, or methods take the lead that changes the network's understanding of what constitutes creative work. Different combinations of theory, methods, and data lead to different kinds of conflicts and different kinds of alliances. For instance, fields that grow by incorporating and standardizing data tend to fight with outsiders; questioning the data from within is destructive to the field as a whole.

Libraries and Archives

Collecting, cataloguing, and archival practices became much more systematic in the nineteenth century, which was representative of significant scholarly networks. Focusing on the holdings of some important nineteenth-century institutions, along with some well-known collectors of the period (François-Joseph Fétis in Brussels, Giuseppe Baini in Rome, and Karl Proske in Regensburg), as well as unfamiliar figures such as William Horsley in London and Pehr Frigel in Stockholm, this chapter highlights a range of concepts that underpinned collectors’ strategies. Drawing on Raphael Kiesewetter’s 1834 categorization of collecting practices, notions of the “ancient,” the “obsolete,” and the “curious” are discussed, and tensions are highlighted between the ideas of completism and of canonicity. Additionally, Aleida Assmann’s work on “cultural memory” allows us to reconsider the “latency” of archival materials, along with the accessibility of such items within nineteenth-century culture.

"As Fifty Years ago so Today, the Uncovering of a Richer and Fuller History is Inextricably Linked to the Continuing Struggle for a Better World"

In this interview, Prof. Timothy Ashplant reflects autobiographically on the intersecting effects – on his chosen research topics, and methodological approaches – of his social location (within successive educational institutions, in a first booming and then de-industrialising Britain), his professional position (working in a Polytechnic/"New Univer-sity"), and the knowledge exchanges arising from his involvement in successive and over-lapping (formal and informal, national and then international) scholarly networks. A member of the post-war "baby-boom" generation, whose student years included the multi-ple upheavals of 1968, he became and remains a member of a political and cultural gener-ation whose concerns – a desire to democratise society and remove (multiple) social and economic inequalities – shaped the matrix within which he formulated historical questions. He traces the impact on his research themes and methods of the transitions from labour to social and cultural history; the development of interdisciplinary approaches; and a grow-ing focus on the construction of class, national and gendered subjectivities, theorised through psychoanalytic concepts and investigated through the analysis of ego-documents. He concludes by evaluating both the defeats and the achievements of his generation's am-bitions, and the continuing relevance of the questions which British social and cultural historians have explored to current crises in Britain and elsewhere in Europe.

Science and Technology in Modern Latin America

Science and technology are witnessing an auspicious moment in Latin America. Once associated exclusively with dictatorships, economic turmoil, and social unrest, the region is becoming an important technological hub according to the media and specialized magazines. Among the explanations for this “techno-scientific moment” is that scientific communities are expanding scholarly networks to communicate their findings in other languages, applying to external funding, pressing for more national funding, and carving a niche in the competitive scenario of journals and collaborative projects. A geopolitical shift has also contributed to this surge. For instance, the end of the embargo era promises a new epoch of cooperation between scholars in Cuba and the United States, something that we could only have imagined until a few years ago. As this occurs on the surface, scholars and resources keep flowing in multiple directions, strengthening less visible networks that serve as platforms for the next stages of creativity and innovation in the region. Techno-scientific communities are trying to find their own niches based on their own backgrounds by developing nascent areas and training future experts. New journals such as Tapuya: Latin America Science, Technology and Society and the visibility of minorities and vulnerable populations represent a good sign. It is also a good sign that science and technology in Latin America are no longer confined to laboratories and campuses. They are now part of the public debate in social media and the streets, where citizens and scientists engage in discussions on how governments should support scientists and knowledge as engines of development and democracy. To highlight the research on science and technology developed by scholars in and of Latin America, this bibliography offers a comprehensive compilation of references published in the last forty years. I have considered science and technology in a broader spectrum, suggesting studies that use the Science and Technology Studies (STS) approach even indirectly. Therefore, this bibliography compiles references extracted from books, edited volumes, journals, dissertations, newspapers, and websites. The references cover a chronological arch from the wars of Independence to the present published in Spanish, Portuguese, and English. Due to the flexible and expansive nature of the STS field, which can also include the study of the environment and history of medicine, I have focused on areas that have not been covered by previous bibliographical essays. I encourage readers to complement this essay with other essays already published by Oxford Bibliographies: “Agricultural Technologies,” “Environmental History,” and “History of Health and Disease in Modern Latin America.”