Konsten att ignorera och välja bort

In Academia archives, office desks and filing cabinets are bursting with material, hard disks are overloaded and calling for more memory space. This paper looks at the routines of selective knowledge. How do scholars learn to decide what is important or not, irrelevant or worth knowing in a given setting and how do we get at such skills that often sink into the unconscious? The focus is on everyday practices of academic work, how people gradually develop routines for handling information, collecting materials or learning to ignore and forget as well. How does one acquire the motoric dexterity of rifling through a filing cabinet, skimming Google pages, deleting emails, or judging a book by holding in it one’s hands? The power of such everyday routines comes from the ways that academic norms and hierarchies are hidden in what seems as nothing more than “the way we do things here”.