Humanities Laboratory

Aleksandra Kil-Matlak holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the University of Wrocław, where she co-founded the Laboratory of Contemporary Humanities. She has contributed to Digital Humanities Quarterly and co-authored Issue Mapping for an Ageing Europe (2018). Her recent book, published in Polish, explores index cards and the analogue humanities.Jacek Małczyński is an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies, University of Wrocław. He co-edited “The Environmental History of the Holocaust”, a special issue of the Journal of Genocide Research (2020), and Knowledge in the Shadow of Catastrophe (2024).Dorota Wolska was a Professor at the Institute of Cultural Studies at the University of Wrocław. Her areas of interest included cultural theory, the philosophy of the humanities, and aesthetics. As editor-in-chief of the Polish journal Prace Kulturoznawcze, she edited volumes on non-human culture, axiotic spaces of culture, and postsecularity.

• Contents - Introduction - Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Ma³czyñski, Dorota Wolska: What Goes on in Humanities Laboratories? - Part 1: Humanities Laboratories - Chapter 1 Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Ma³czyñski, Dorota Wolska: The Tricky Case of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale - Chapter 2 Jacek Ma³czyñski: The Laboratory as a “Soap Bubble”: Juri Lotman, the Tartu-Moscow school and the Laboratory of History and Semiotics - Chapter 3 Miros³aw Kocur: Jerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre: A Laboratory in Search of the Truth - Chapter 4 Aleksandra Kil-Matlak: An Archaeology of the Humanities Infrastructure: Paul Otlet and Laboratorium Mundaneum - Chapter 5 Karolina Charewicz-Jakubowska: The Private Banker of Academia: The case of Aby Warburg’s Laboratory of Cultural-Scientific Picture-History - Part 2: Laboratorisation of the Humanities - Chapter 6 Krzysztof £ukasiewicz: The Laboratory Effect: Laboratories in Leipzig at the Turn of the Twentieth Century - Chapter 7 Adam Pisarek: The Laboratorisation of the Field: The Formation of the Anthropological Mode of Knowledge - Chapter 8 Rafa³ Nahirny: Jeremy Bentham and the Formation of the Laboratory of Power-Knowledge - Part 3: The Post-humanist laboratory - Chapter 9 Magdalena Zamorska: The Humanities Laboratory and Neoliberal Academia: The case of SenseLab - Chapter 10 Joanna Sieracka: Swarm in the Post-humanities Laboratory: On Collective Research Practices from a Post-humanist Perspective