Exploring Histories of Knowledge and Education: An Introduction

Nordic Journal of Educational History 2022. © Björn Lundberg. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons CC-BY4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). In the last few years, the history of knowledge has emerged as a rapidly growing subfield of historical inquiry, with the establishment of new research centres as well as the publication of journals, books, and special issues of academic journals.1 To a certain extent, the desire to address the role of knowledge in the past can be viewed in light of contemporary social and political processes. A new digital public sphere has shaken the epistemological pillars of democracies in the Nordic countries and the Western world at large. The information superhighway of the Internet has become crowded with vehicles of disinformation, a turn of events few predicted 25 years ago. This course of events has provoked new academic interest in the social and political dynamics of knowledge in society. Concepts like fake news and alternative facts have become symbols of this full-on attack on established notions of truth-seeking, but disinformation and knowledge resistance go far beyond the political spin of populist politicians. As Robert N. Proctor has pointed out, knowledge (or the lack thereof) should clearly not be understood simply in cumulative terms, but rather as a complex social and cultural phenomenon.2 As such, knowledge has a history, or histories, which conveys important insights for the present. However, the sudden rise of knowledge as a key concern for social activists and policymakers is not the exclusive reason that the history of knowledge has expanded so rapidly in scholarly circles. It has also proved fruitful in its integrative capacities within academia, bringing together scholars from different backgrounds to address new problems. As Johan Östling, David Larsson Heidenblad and Anna Nilsson