Knowledge about Africa: Discourses and Practices of Textbook Production in Germany and England (1945-1995)

该项目探索与非洲有关的知识的连续性和变化，以及在1945年至1995年期间东德、西德和英国对知识进行辩论、推崇和传播的政治和社会进程。教科书是该项目的中心研究对象和主要来源。大众媒体的影响被认为是深远的，带有强大的客观性，但存在于官方国家框架内，不可避免地受到当时政治气候的影响，因此引发了辩论，教科书使我们能够获得对产生这些媒体的社会和时代的主要解释模式和知识结构的重要见解。该项目将对与非洲有关的课程规定和教科书说明进行共时和历时的比较分析，并绘制与非洲有关的知识谱系，仅此一项就有望填补一个重大的研究空白。处于该项目核心的三个社会所拥有的关于非洲的知识宝库充分证明了这些社会的自我描述；在这方面，该项目将超越记录关于非洲的各种社会知识，探索围绕教科书编写的论述和做法，特别侧重于有助于确定被认为与下一代相关的知识或相反地与之无关的、因此可以忽略不计的知识的因素和利益攸关方。因此，该项目将利用知识史和文化翻译相关研究的创新方法，以便在教育和教科书的历史研究中产生新的发现。它将审查教科书中关于非洲的知识是否以及如何在知识领域之间传播、经历文化翻译、纳入新的背景以及合并和重新组合。该项目团队将分析教科书出版商的语料库，而历史研究到目前为止几乎没有获得这些语料库。该项目的工作将围绕三个关键领域展开：1.1945年至1995年出版的课程和教科书，分析与非洲有关的文字、图像和学生任务；2.编写教科书的做法，主要利用档案资料进行探索；3.利用档案资料、灰色文献、关于教科书的建议、请愿书以及国家和跨国机构发布的声明和法令等资料，对教科书中有关非洲的知识进行社会辩论。研究人员将把注意力转向跨越国家间甚至冷战所引起的边界的知识转移过程，并将以与先前研究确定为关键重要性的分析观点密切相关的问题为指导，例如种族和机构的概念，以及对进步的历史学叙述。

The project explores continuities and changes in knowledge related to Africa, and in the political and social processes in which knowledge is debated, canonised and transmitted, in East and West Germany and England between 1945 and 1995. Textbooks are the project's central object of study and its key source. As mass media whose impact is perceived as far-reaching and which carry a powerful nimbus of objectivity, yet which exist within official state frameworks and are inevitably influenced by the political climate of their time, thus giving rise to debate, textbooks allow us to access important insights into dominant patterns of interpretation and knowledge structures in the societies and eras which produced them. The project will conduct synchronic and diachronic comparative analysis of curricular stipulations relating to, and textbook representations of, Africa, and draw up genealogies of Africa-related knowledge which alone promise to fill a significant research gap. The repositories of knowledge on Africa held by the three societies at the core of the project bear eloquent witness to these societies' self-descriptions; in this context, the project will go above and beyond documenting societal sets of knowledge on Africa by exploring discourses and practices around textbook production, with a specific focus on factors and stakeholders instrumental in identifying the knowledge deemed relevant, or, conversely, irrelevant and therefore negligible, to upcoming generations and, by implication, to societal futures. The project will thus harness innovative approaches to the history of knowledge and related research on cultural translation in order to generate new discoveries in historical research into education and textbooks. It will examine whether and how knowledge on Africa contained in textbooks circulated among fields of knowledge, experiencing cultural translation, inclusion in new contexts, and combination and re-combination. The project team will analyse corpora from textbook publishers which historical research has thus far barely accessed. The project's work will revolve around three key areas: 1. Curricula and textbooks published between 1945 and 1995, with analysis of text, images and student tasks relating to representations of Africa; 2. practices of textbook production, to be primarily explored using archive sources; and 3. societal debates on knowledge about Africa in textbooks, using sources including archive material, grey literature, recommendations on textbooks, petitions, and statements and decrees issued by national and transnational institutions. The researchers will turn an attentive eye to processes of knowledge transfer transcending boundaries between nations and even those drawn by the Cold War, and will be guided by questions closely associated with analytical perspectives previous research has identified as of key importance, such as the concepts of race and agency and historiographical narratives of progress.