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THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE is dedicated to promoting new and innovative research on and related to the theme of local knowledge. By local knowledge we mean a community’s shared understanding of its cultural, economic, political, and social relations, across space and time, and the implications for the everyday ordering and reordering of society. The Center’s primary research objective is to explore and articulate new ways of understanding how conceptions of local knowledge are implicated in constructions of gender, race, and nation.

THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE fosters mutually beneficial partnerships by creating new venues for intellectual exchange and collaboration across a number of unstable yet stubbornly persistent divides – between academic and lay scholars, between the humanities and the sciences, and between cultures of Western and non-Western scholarship. To this end, the Center is committed to investigating new methods of scholarly production and reproduction with the aim of illuminating – and potentially transforming – relationships of knowledge and power.

THE CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE takes the very idea of “local” as the starting point of its scholarly investigations. In addition, several key questions animate the research, teaching, and policy initiatives of the Center:
  • How do scholars across academic disciplines conceptualize and represent local knowledge?
  • What is the role of lay scholars in the production and reproduction of local knowledge?
  • How do conceptions of local knowledge inform discourses of gender, race, and nation over space and time?
  • What are the teaching, research, and public policy implications of new interpretative models that link conceptions of local knowledge to national and international discourses?