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History of Knowledge Seminar Series: Bureaucracy as Knowledge

10 jun 2021
Van 15:30 - 17:00uur
Online

All are invited to join the next meeting of the History of Knowledge Seminar Series @ Utrecht University organized by Lukas M. Verburgt (UU) and Elske de Waal (UU).  

Christine von Oertzen (MPIWG, Berlin) and Sebastian Felten (University of Vienna) “Bureaucracy as Knowledge”

Date: Thursday 10 June 2021
Time: 15:30-17:00 (CEST)
Place: Online (Microsoft Teams)
* Registration is not required. Please find the link to the meeting below *

Description

Bureaucracy was a term of critique that in Europe around 1900 became an analytical concept for world-historical comparison, most prominently in the work of Max Weber. Against this background, the multi-authored publication Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge develops a non-Weberian approach of analysing bureaucratic procedures as knowledge processes, a method we term “bureaucracy as knowledge.” This approach builds on historical epistemology and aims to recover actors’ ways of organising social and natural world rather than to judge them by modernist, Western standards. We found surprising similarities across our cases, such as the use of questionnaires in the medieval Latin West and in colonial German New Guinea, or of calendars in the Ottoman Empire and Central Europe.

Could richly contextualised case studies such as the ones united in this volume show the way to a long-term and global history of bureaucracy? We suggest three potential ways of writing such a history: recovering genealogies of bureaucratic genres; tracing bureaucratic personae; and re-constructing cross-cultural entanglements. We end by placing Weber’s conceptual work in a wider context of transnational debate and reform.

Speakers

Christine von Oertzen is Principal Investigator of the subject area ‘Data, Media, Mind’ at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and S-Professor for Media Practices at the Humboldt University Berlin. Sebastian Felten is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was a Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin between 2015 and 2018. Together, von Oertzen and Felten edited the collective volume on Histories of Bureaucratic Knowledge, which is the result of a working group at the MPIWG and was published in December 2020 as a Special Issue of the Journal for the History of Knowledge. 

More information

Please visit our website or send an email to historyofknowledge.utrecht@gmail.com.

Link to the meeting

Microsoft Teams meeting

Click here to join the meeting

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