Page - 137 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 2/2016

Abstract In October 2015, historian Peter Burke gave a conference in Graz1 on “Exiles and expatriates in the history of knowledge”. Having started as a specialist of Renaissance, the theme of displaced people and knowledge makes up his forthcoming book2. The days around that date saw the peak of refugees’ transit through Styria, an estimated 3000 people a day travelling North across the Slovenian-Austrian border. It is rare in intellectual life that a large scale social process happens in reach of scholarly workplaces, as it is rare that this conicides with a debate on the theme of displacement within the history of ideas. The accompanying use of an escalating language in media, which was using words like “Völkerwanderung” or “mass migration” aroused our interest in the relative size of the phenomenon. How will a historian reframe topical questions? Keywords migration, displacement, history and memory, knowledge migration 1 Keynote by Peter Burke in “Dimensionen des Wissens – normativ : kreativ : subversiv”, Graz University, October 20th, 2015. 2 Peter Burke. Gains and Losses (forthcoming, 2017) Cultural displacements and intellectual moorings A conversation with Peter Burke Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal, Vol. 2 2016, 153-164 Open Access: content is licensed under CC BY 3.0