(Un)making Knowledge: students’ relationship with knowledge from Modernity to AI

Application summary

This project examines dynamic relationship between educational knowledge and students both in historical perspective and in the light of the societal, technological and ethical paradigms of the new millennium. 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). We aim at breaching the self-contained methodologies of our different disciplines by working with open-framed methodological approach, across such dissimilar registers as literary texts, documentary data, case studies, 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.