Genealogies of Knowledge: The Evolution and Contestation of Concepts across Time and Space

Democracy, civil society, nation, natural law. human rights, equality, experiment, cause, evidence, truth, validity, expertise - these are all key cultural concepts with a long history that remain central to social and political life today. This project explores how our understanding of these concepts has evolved since they first emerged and how translation has impacted this transformation, as these concepts have travelled across centuries, languages and cultures. The fact that established interpretations of these notions are still being renegotiated today by civil society groups in digital participatory environments further demonstrates the need to understand the processes of mutation that shaped their historical development.

Much research has focused on the development of these concepts individually, at particular times, in specific places - e.g. equality in early modern Europe, the emergence of democracy in Ancient Greece, or the concept of proof from Euclid to Einstein. However, little or no attempt has been made to trace the genealogy of individual concepts or constellations of concepts through processes of (re)translation. We also lack the analytical and computational tools to map the evolution of key political and scientific concepts in those languages that have attained a near global reach at different points in history across the boundaries of country and creed. Greek thought in particular has been highly influential, but strikingly as much in Latin, Arabic and English translations as in Greek. The project will study the translation of central concepts in the humanities and sciences into these three lingua francas (Latin, Arabic and English). It will develop methods and techniques to study translation phenomena from/into Greek, early Latin, medieval Arabic and modern English, focusing on key historical moments that have brought about transformations in the interpretation of such concepts across the last 2500 years.

To achieve these aims, the project will compile large corpora, i.e. electronic collections of texts. Modern scientific study of translations depends on computer analyses of such machine-readable collections, whether monolingual or bilingual (e.g. comprising both the original texts in Greek and their translations in Arabic). It will also develop powerful software applications to interrogate the corpora and assist with the presentation of the findings to other researchers and the public. The development and application of new IT visualisation and other heuristic techniques across three different scripts (Greek, Roman and Arabic) will represent a major innovation.

The project further breaks new ground by exploring how key cultural concepts in political and scientific thought are being redefined by networked political communities and independent media as part of an evolving radical-democratic project. In response to state-centred forms of democratic praxis, civil society actors are shifting towards a non-state model of democracy based on principles of diversity and horizontality. In this fluid context, concepts that traditionally underpinned scientific discourse (e.g. evidence, expertise, truth) are becoming less central to the construction and dissemination of knowledge, which is now regarded as partial and provisional. Through our corpus-based heuristic techniques we will analyse and map these ongoing processes of knowledge renegotiation.

To tackle these questions, senior scholars from Graeco-Arabic Studies, Translation Studies, Digital Media and Communication, and Computer Science will supervise a team of two postdoctoral research associates, one PhD student, and one project support officer. The project will lead to significant advances in individual fields and yield novel insights into how translations generate and transform knowledge; how cultural icons and frameworks of understanding emerge and evolve over time; and how the past directly informs our experience and expression of the present.

The wider and non-academic stakeholders who will benefit from the findings of this project include the following:

(1) Not-for-profit organisations involved in popularising alternative histories of science (such as the Foundation for Science, Technology and Civilisation (FSTC), with which members of the project team have collaborated in the past), organise educational initiatives and public events that would benefit from drawing on the findings of the case studies on key cultural concepts pertaining to the history of science (with particular focus on medical advances). For example, many people believe that 'evidence-based medicine' is a relatively recent development. Yet by tracing notions of evidence from Greek philosophical and medical texts to the modern world, the project will reveal a multifaceted web of conceptual transformations: medicine was always evidence-based, but our understanding of evidence has changed profoundly. We will liaise with FSTC and establish a joint public outreach programme to publicise these findings. By collaborating with FSTC, we will promote greater public understanding of the historical contribution of the ancient Greek, Latin and Arab linguacultures to scientific progress through a range of public engagement activities.

(2) Community initiatives that attempt to raise cultural awareness and encourage global connectedness, such as the Global Education Conference Network (GECN), can draw on findings from case studies on key cultural concepts about the body politic to demonstrate the connections and contingencies that shape the diverse cultural outlooks of our world and stimulate young people to engage critically with such diversity and contingency. We will participate in two GECN annual conferences to disseminate the results of our research among educators who seek to inspire action towards social cohesion through curricular innovation. We will also cooperate with the iEARN Collaboration Centre by creating a dedicated collaborative group and delivering webinars for educators participating in the group. These links will help us foster inter-cultural appreciation of the diverse outlooks on political and social issues that lie at the heart of cosmopolitan communities.

(3) Alternative media and news outlets such as Indymedia and Global Uprisings, and civil society organisations such as The World Social Forum, can draw on the findings of relevant case studies on key scientific and cultural concepts to contextualise their own practices and discourses within a historical and cross-cultural context; they can also use the corpora created for this project through the web interface hosted by The University of Manchester Library to conduct further analyses that might feed into their campaigning and advocacy work. Team members, who have collaborated with these groups in the past, will rely on their websites to disseminate the findings of selected case studies; they will also deliver workshops in international events organised by relevant organisations, such as the Global Voices Summits, that take place every two years. By participating in these events, we will prompt critical reflection among networked radical democratic groups and counter-hegemonic globalisation movements about their role in reinterpreting key cultural concepts in political and scientific thought in the era of digital culture.

(4) The general public will be interested in the findings of case studies given that they concern everyday concepts that are central to the way we all understand our place in the world and regularly feature in public debates about politics, religion, science and social responsibility. Through podcasts in the project legacy website, media appearances and releases by the University's Press Office, the project team will raise public awareness of how (re)translation and networked technologies have brought and continue to bring changes to our understanding of key cultural concepts in the humanities and sciences.