The Ends of Knowledge

Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara, USA; she studies the literature and media of the long eighteenth century, with particular interests in newspapers, periodicals, and letters. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures. She completed her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and her B.A. in Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University.Seth Rudy is Associate Professor and Charles M. Glover Chair of English at Rhodes College, USA, where he studies the history of ideas and encyclopedic knowledge projects of the eighteenth century. He is the author of Literature and Encyclopedism in Enlightenment Britain: The Pursuit of Complete Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). He completed his Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University, and his BFA in Film Production at the Tisch School of the Arts.

Bringing together an exciting group of knowledge workers, scholars and activists from across fields, this book revisits a foundational question of the Enlightenment: what is "the last or furthest end of knowledge"? It is a book about why we do what we do, and how we might know when we are done.In the reorganization of knowledge that characterized the Enlightenment, disciplines were conceived as having particular "ends," both in terms of purposes and end-points. As we experience an ongoing shift to the knowledge economy of the Information Age, this collection asks whether we still conceptualize knowledge in this way. Does an individual discipline have both an inherent purpose and a natural endpoint? What do an experiment on a fruit fly, a reading of a poem, and the writing of a line of code have in common?Focusing on areas as diverse as AI; biology; Black studies; literary studies; physics; political activism; and the concept of disciplinarity itself, contributors uncover a life after disciplinarity for subjects that face immediate threats to the structure if not the substance of their contributions. These essays - whether reflective, historical, eulogistic, or polemical - chart a vital and necessary course towards the reorganization of knowledge production as a whole.

Taps into ongoing conversations around the 'value' of different kinds of knowledge within the academy (eg the humanities)

PrefaceIntroductionSeth Rudy and Rachael Scarborough KingPart I: UnificationThe Ends of Physics B. R. BrownThe Ends of Literary StudiesAaron HanlonThe Ends of ComputingGeoffrey C. BowkerThe Ends of BiologyB.N. QueenanThe Ends of Digital HumanitiesMark Algee-HewittPart II: AccessThe Ends of LawYochai BenklerThe Ends of JournalismJolene AlmendarezThe Ends of PedagogySean Michael MorrisThe Ends of the Liberal ArtsG. Gabrielle StarrPart III: UtopiaThe Ends of Artificial IntelligenceHong QuThe Ends of Gender StudiesUla Lukszo KleinThe Ends of ActivismAdy BarkanThe Ends of Environmental StudiesMyanna LahsenPart IV: ConceptsThe Ends of Performance StudiesJessica NakamuraThe Ends of HistoryMarieke HendriksenThe Ends of Black StudiesKenneth W. WarrenThe Ends of Cultural StudiesMike HillAfterwordClifford SiskinList of ContributorsIndex