Today we are often told that we live in the era of the knowledge and information society and of globalization, with webs of (almost) instantaneous communication spanning the globe and (even) parts of the universe. Indeed, by the end of the 1990s, when industrial production appeared to be moving (back) from the West to the East, the notion of the knowledge and information society became central in the post-industrial West in shaping policies and in the global bench-marking of the success, productivity and competitiveness of societies. Since the late 2010s we might be witnessing attempts to re-industrialize the West, while the East has been quickly integrating into global knowledge and information economies. The rise of these knowledge-intensive societies has also become the object of increasingly intensive historical research, which inspires this undergraduate research course. In this course students are introduced to the theme and then work on their own research project using a set of primary sources to write an original research paper.
Taught each Fall.
Taught each Fall.
- Teacher: Arjan Dixhoorn