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.

• ContentsIntroductionAleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Ma³czyñski, Dorota WolskaWhat Goes on in Humanities Laboratories? Part 1: Humanities LaboratoriesChapter 1Aleksandra Kil-Matlak, Jacek Ma³czyñski, Dorota WolskaThe Tricky Case of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Laboratoire d’anthropologie socialeChapter 2Jacek Ma³czyñskiThe Laboratory as a “Soap Bubble”: Juri Lotman, the Tartu-Moscow school and the Laboratory of History and SemioticsChapter 3Miros³aw KocurJerzy Grotowski’s Laboratory Theatre: A Laboratory in Search of the TruthChapter 4Aleksandra Kil-MatlakAn Archaeology of the Humanities Infrastructure: Paul Otlet and Laboratorium MundaneumChapter 5Karolina Charewicz-JakubowskaThe Private Banker of Academia: The case of Aby Warburg’s Laboratory of Cultural-Scientific Picture-HistoryPart 2: Laboratorisation of the HumanitiesChapter 6Krzysztof £ukasiewiczThe Laboratory Effect: Laboratories in Leipzig at the Turn of the Twentieth CenturyChapter 7Adam Pisarek The Laboratorisation of the Field: The Formation of the Anthropological Mode of KnowledgeChapter 8Rafa³ NahirnyJeremy Bentham and the Formation of the Laboratory of Power-KnowledgePart 3: The Post-humanist laboratoryChapter 9Magdalena ZamorskaThe Humanities Laboratory and Neoliberal Academia: The case of SenseLabChapter 10Joanna SierackaSwarm in the Post-humanities Laboratory: On Collective Research Practices from a Post-humanist Perspective