Exploration as Knowledge Transfer: Exhibiting Hidden Histories

Abstract

This paper is concerned with two things that depend, essentially, on the spatial mobility of knowledge.1 First there is geographical exploration, a process of knowledge-making involving the translation of ideas, people, and things across space in a two-way movement between known and unknown territory. This is, as is clear from much historical and contemporary research, an uneven process in which certain things get translated more readily than others. There is, so to speak, a politics, as well as a physics, of knowledge transfer. The second is public exhibition, a project designed to disseminate knowledge (in the case I will discuss, knowledge of exploration) to a wider audience, a process sometimes described in higher education under the bureaucratic rubric of "knowledge transfer." The idea linking these two things is simple enough, but deserving of further elaboration in many different ways, as the contributions to this volume attest. The thing transferred-the knowledge explorers brought home, the knowledge imparted through an exhibition-is transformed in the course of its translation. Space, like language, is not a neutral surface over which knowledge travels, or an empty container into which we can pour our learning; it enters into and shapes that knowledge in significant ways

Off the beaten track? Critical approaches to exploration studies

“…It has been shown, however, that Western explorers rarely acknowledged the contributions that such actors made to their expeditions. Rarer still did they acknowledge fully their (often substantial) dependence on non-European people, many of whom were travellers in their own right and not at all "local" (Driver, 2017;Jones, 2010). Stephen Rockel (2014), for instance, highlights how the European exploration of East Africa was only possible due to the prior existence of extensive trading caravans.…”

Making Mount Kilimanjaro German: Nation building and heroic masculinity in the colonial geographies of Hans Meyer

“…The paper draws on the rich literature on Geography, colonialism and exploration in late 19th‐century Africa (Driver, , ), on the production of the trustworthy (geographical) self (Bond, ; Heffernan, ; Jöns, ; Shapin, ; Withers, ) and especially on the production of white masculinity within this context (Myers, ; Reidy, ; Rose, ; Sundberg, ; Terrall, ). Further, it seeks to complement research interested in the material production and communication of geographical knowledge from a science studies perspective, which encompasses exploration of the role of instruments and technologies of recording (Ryan, ; Withers, ) and the transfer of knowledge from the field to printed text (Keighren et al., ), talks, and “geography's venues,” such as museums and geographical societies (Agnew & Livingstone, ; Barnett, ; Finnegan, ; Koivunen, ; MacDonald & Withers, ; Naylor, ; Ryan, ).…”

Scientific and Cultural Relations between Heidelberg University and Hungary over Five Centuries

“…Geography, history, science studies, and other disciplines have long reflected an interest in connections between travel and the production of knowledge (Almási, 2014;Clifford, 1992;Driver, 2001Driver, , 2017Duncan & Gregory, 1999;Gregory, 1999Gregory, , 2000Horn, 2014;Jöns, Heffernan, & Meusburger, 2017;Naylor & Ryan, 2010;Thomas, 2015). Most studies on this subject tend to fall into one of two categories: (a) knowledge acquired on expeditions by researchers and explorers in Africa, South America, and Asia and on travel commissioned by colonial authorities, and (b) knowledge gained through Grand Tours, study tours, and formal learning outside one's home country.…”