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Smuggling a library to safety

From Africa·An enduring case

When militants occupied Timbuktu in 2012, families and archivists smuggled hundreds of thousands of medieval manuscripts out in trunks and boats, hiding a written tradition that itself refutes the myth of an Africa without books. The rescue was improvised by the same households that had preserved the pages for centuries.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

CultureThe Knower's Lens
The shared practices, language and inherited assumptions of a community of knowers. Culture supplies the questions that seem worth asking and the answers that seem obvious, so its influence is hardest to see from inside it.
ResponsibilityKnowledge and Society
What a knower owes as a result of knowing, or of being in a position to know. It covers obligations in producing knowledge, in passing it on accurately, and in acting or refusing to act on it, including the responsibility taken on by choosing not to look.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.