(Un)Making Knowledge: Students’ relationship with knowledge from Modernity to AI

This interdisciplinary project explores the dynamic relationship between knowledge and students in higher education. The digitalisation of education, the encroachment of shortcut formats of knowledge such as Wikipedia, the facilitation of accessing knowledge (e.g. via Google search), and, most recently, the rapid pervasion of artificial intelligence (AI), signal a pivotal shift. 

Technological and artificial proxies invite us to think of both knowledge-making and learning in terms of human and non-human entanglement as well as prioritise access to knowledge over its appropriation and possession. At the same time, we can detect the seeds of the recent changes in educational policies and practices already in the patterns that evolved and iterated in the 18th and 19th centuries, a period known as classical modernity.

We have two research objectives. First, we aspire to trace the ways knowledge production, dissemination and consumption has been imagined and conceptualised in literary and cultural narratives as well as in intellectual and pedagogical discussions from classical modernity (since mid-18th century) to the era of AI and current education policy. Second, we will explore students’ relationship with knowledge in contemporary higher education, particularly focusing on the implications of AI use, revising the prevailing modes of thinking and speaking about knowledge.

To reach these objectives, we apply three approaches: historical-cultural (literary studies, intellectual history), societal-institutional (sociology of education), and pedagogical-interactional (cognitive science, educational psychology). The research combines historical and theoretical analysis with new empirical data, including literary texts, policy documents, curricula, students’ logs, interviews, and art-based focus groups.

Producing a rich understanding of the students’ relationship with knowledge from history to today serves rethinking the educational role and purpose of higher education in the digitalised era. The diachronic course of understanding knowledge in its relationship with its main ‘consumers’ and ‘carriers’ is a vital question to science community, its renewal and continuity. This project creates a fertile portrayal of multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives to educational knowledge revealing links between past and present, imaginary fiction and actual practices. It also allows rethinking how to face the complexity and limits of knowledge and prepare for an unknown future in a holistic and sustainable way.

Research team

Johanna Annala
Juliene Madureira Ferreira
Alexandra Urakova
Harry Quedenfeld
Vesna Holubek