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

该项目探讨了与非洲有关的知识的连续性和变化，以及1945年至1995年间，在东德、西德和英国，知识在政治和社会过程中被辩论、推崇和传播。教科书是该项目的中心研究对象和主要来源。作为大众传媒，其影响被认为是深远的，具有强大的客观性，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，从而引发辩论，教科书使我们能够深入了解产生它们的社会和时代的主流解释模式和知识结构。该项目将对与非洲有关的课程规定和教科书描述进行共时性和历时性的比较分析，并编制与非洲有关的知识谱系，仅此一项就有望填补重大的研究空白。作为该项目核心的三个社会所掌握的关于非洲的知识库有力地证明了这些社会的自我描述；在此背景下，该项目将通过探索教科书制作的话语和实践，超越记录非洲社会知识的范围，特别关注有助于确定对下一代以及由此隐含的社会未来相关或不相关的知识的因素和利益相关者。因此，该项目将利用知识历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。它将研究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，在新背景下的包容，以及组合和重新组合。该项目团队将分析教科书出版商的语料库，迄今为止，历史研究几乎没有接触过这些语料库。该项目的工作将围绕三个关键领域：1。1945年至1995年期间出版的课程和教科书，并对有关非洲表现的文本、图像和学生任务进行分析；2. 教材制作的实践，主要是利用档案资源进行探索；和3。关于教科书中非洲知识的社会辩论，使用的资源包括档案材料、灰色文献、教科书建议、请愿书以及国家和跨国机构发布的声明和法令。研究人员将专注于超越国界的知识转移过程，甚至超越冷战的边界，并将受到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的指导，例如种族和能动性的概念以及进步的史学叙述。

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.