Knowledge, Cultural Memory Archives and Research
The module offers a critical introduction to research methods. It foregrounds and engages with the critical implications of knowledge in the Humanities through interdisciplinary approaches to literature, visual, material, and spatial cultures as they are understood, interpreted, and mobilized. Highlighting questions raised by discourse on epistemology, memory, archives, and research itself, the module concentrates on the complex links between: organic and technical forms of memory; public and private cultural institutions of knowledge, memory and identity; and information-gathering, retrieval, and analysis.
In the first semester, the module integrates research skills and methods (practical skills, evaluation and judgement, collation and presentation) with critical analysis of knowledge and cultural value. It will involve two key themes, and these two themes will be explored via two three-week long blocks:
- Knowledge, with sessions entitled: What is Postgraduate-ness? What is Knowledge? What is Research?
- Research, with sessions entitled: What is History? What is Cultural Memory? What is an Archive?
In the second semester, the general and theoretical knowledge of the first will be brought to bear on detailed attention, via focused case studies, to cultural and aesthetic engagements with issues of the economics and politics of knowledge and memory.