Cultivating information, organizing culture: Exploring classification practices in modern culture

The purpose of this conference is to begin a Nordic interdisciplinary conversation about how modern culture increasingly is articulated through and debated as questions of classification.

Abstract

Modern culture is saturated with disputes about who and what belongs to where: who is and who is not included in the gender categories of women and men? Who is allowed to utter something on behalf of others? What kind of information is prioritized by algorithms? Shall public libraries contain hateful materials or define the limits of the right to expression? These, and other questions, are deep questions about how we see ‘the other’, how we produce categories, and how we make sense of categories, or not. They are questions about how we cultivate information and organize the culture around us. The conference ‘Cultivating information, organizing culture: Exploring classification practices in modern culture’ homes in on these socially and culturally significant questions. Raising awareness of classification practices in modern culture serves to emphasize how sorting things into categories is both an everyday accomplishment and a highly cultural and political activity with consequences for those who are classified and for those who classify.