Review: Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University

Down a 2,000-foot-long passage in the Quincy Mine in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is a small classroom created by Michigan Technical University students, a water drainage path they enlarged in the 1970s to create an experimental mine for their studies and research. Today, the East Adit, a horizontal passage at level seven (of ninety), forms the central experience of the Quincy Mine tour, where a visitor can learn of the geology, labor, and technologies that intersected in the difficult task of copper extraction. As one walks past the classroom, one sees a chalkboard and desks, abandoned in disarray after the departure of the last class. But this novel pedagogical space has no place in Reinhold Martin’s Knowledge Worlds: Media, Materiality, and the Making of the Modern University, where the author investigates the weblike structure that produces the modern university out of complex threads of knowledge. This book is the latest...