Privacy Talk with Mette Birkedal Bruun, Professor of Church History at the University of Copenhagen: Why is the privacy dialogue so important?
“This interview recorded on 28th June 2022 is talking about privacy
and history”
Kohei is having great time discussing privacy and history with Mette Birkedal Bruun.
This interview outline:
- Introduction
- What is the Center for Privacy Studies and your role?
- What is the purpose for research at the Center?
- Why is the privacy dialogue so important?
Kohei: So, thank you for coming to the Privacy Talk. I’m quite honored to invite Professor Mette from Copenhagen. I’m very inspired from her work. So that’s fine. I’m gonna be happy to have a call with her today.
So, Mette, thank you for coming at this moment.
Mette: Thank you for your invitation. It’s great to be here.
Kohei: Thank you.
So let me start the introduction for her profile. She is professor of church history at the University of Copenhagen, specializing in monks and other forms of religiously motivated withdrawal from the world.
More importantly in this context, she is the director of the Danish National Research Foundation Centre for Privacy Studies which is dedicated to research into historical notions of privacy and the private.
The Centre was founded in 2017, it brings together historians of architecture, law, political ideas, religion and social conditions. The research team examines how explicit and implicit notions of privacy shape relations between individuals and society across diverse historical contexts.
They are particularly interested in indications of privacy as a value and as a threat, and aim to mobilize historical insights as a resource for research and debates on contemporary privacy issues.
So again, appreciate it having a call this moment. Thank you.
Mette: Thank you.
- Introduction
Kohei: Well, let’s start today’s agenda. I’d like to know more about your work related to church history. I was lucky to be in Christ, when I was in high school and university school. I’m very curious about this part of the academy regions. So why did you get interested in this field and could you tell us about what is church history?
Mette: Yes. So church history, where I come from, is the history of the Christian tradition. So that means both Christian institutions and texts and doctrines, but also the way in which the Christian doctrines and the Christian faith interact with other cultural manifestations.
So that could be architecture or art, images, music, so in a way, it’s an extremely broad field, but centered on the Christian tradition in these past worlds. So there will be 2000 years of history.
Kohei: Thank you. So why did you interest in this space? Because it’s a very unique study for me, I’m happy to know about it.
Mette: I think it’s very interesting. Because although we, the world is becoming — and that pertains to the Western world, as well, in many ways — more and more secular, the religious tradition is still very central to our whole cultural history and so many cultural manifestations even in our contemporary world.
And I think actually, privacy is a very good example, because it doesn’t seem at all a religiously coded concept. But when we begin to investigate the tradition, we see, actually, that there are some religious roots in the Western concept of privacy.
So that’s actually a very good illustration of the ways in which church history may inform and help us to understand cultural manifestations also in a more secular context.
Kohei: I see. Thank you. So you organize the Centre for Privacy Studies at this moment, it’s a kind of laboratory to research from the very variety of perspectives from history to the privacy space. So what is the center of walking and also what is your role for this center?
- What is the Center for Privacy Studies and your role?
Mette: Well, the center first of all, it’s a wonderful place. We’re sitting in a corridor here at the University of Copenhagen with some 15 scholars, postdocs and PhD students working on, as you said, historical notions of privacy.
So it’s a very vivid research environment and that’s a daily treat and really an academic luxury to have this kind of environment. The idea is to establish a collaborative workforce because the fields, and you mentioned the fields that are involved in the Centre for Privacy Studies, are fields where people are used to working alone.
So we have been trained to work alone, and it’s very centered on solo publications, for instance, and here at the center, we’re trying to develop a work form that allows us to do research together. Because we think that interdisciplinary collaboration is extremely important when you want to study something as complex as privacy.
So it’s very important to combine different approaches in order to see a sort of more holistic view and understanding of privacy and I think actually, a lot of topics would benefit from an interdisciplinary investigation.
So we’re actually also hoping perhaps to establish models of interdisciplinary collaborations that may be transposed to other forms of investigations.
Kohei: Thank you. So what is this center for any purposes or any goals that you are setting them to? Directions for that?
- What is the purpose for research at the Center?
Mette: Yeah, so on the one hand, we have methodological goals that I already talked a little bit about, we’re hoping to develop a more collaborative work form that will hopefully reach a wider influence in the fields that we are involved in.
So in these different historical fields: history of architecture, social history, history of religion, history of political ideas, legal history, to actually train scholars who are more used to collaborating and who like to collaborate, that’s also a big goal, so we have a methodological goal.
We also have a goal pertaining to substance so we want to investigate historical notions of privacy. And we want to investigate it in a way that shows how complex the historical notion of privacy is, because — and we will we’ll probably talk more about that — of course it’s very difficult to come to history with a concept such as privacy, which is so heavily charged in a contemporary context.
So there is constantly the risk of what we in historical studies call anachronism. And that is that you approach historical topics with a modern worldview, in a way.
So it’s important to avoid that. But at the same time, it’s also true that the historical manifestations of privacy are somehow part of the cultural DNA, you may say, of contemporary notions of privacy. And of course, they have been transformed and transmuted and undergone a lot of different sorts of developments along the way.
So there is no directionality. But I think it’s important to understand the historical roots and we’re hoping to investigate and explain, and ensure some of those roots here at the center.
And the idea is that if we get a better understanding of the historical roots of the contemporary conception of privacy, we may perhaps also inform contemporary debates on privacy.
And of course, we’re historians so we’re not experts on the contemporary situation. But by, in a way, developing our collaborative mindset through an exchange with people who are interested in contemporary notions of privacy such as yourself, iIt’s the idea that these exchanges make all of us much wiser.
- Why is the privacy dialogue so important?
Kohei: Yeah, thank you. I learned a lot from the history of the privacy especially for the Western countries where it’s been originated this concept.
For Japanese, it’s not that easy to comprehend what is privacy. When we compare it to the different kinds of the aspects of the privacy, we can make in our imaginations that what is it privacy, oh, that’s a privacy you have it that’s going to kind of be communication.
That is a big good driver to stipulate it how we can enhance it together related to the privacy dialogue. So yeah, that’s very awesome, too.
Mette: I think you’re right and it’s so interesting for people who come out of the west to be reminded that privacy is not necessarily a global phenomenon because we have this, we have this sense, well, everybody has a notion of privacy because for us, the whole distinction between private and public is so basic in so many ways; so already Aristotle … and it’s really sort of, it’s at the core of our culture in so many ways.
So it’s extremely useful and helpful for us to be reminded that there are actually many different approaches to this. So your project, I think, with these interviews is extremely important as well. So that has been very inspiring for me to get in touch with you.
Kohei: Thank you for the praise and being involved in this moment. So I want to move with you the next question. So you have the published related to the privacy history. There you’re providing some historical information also some of the differences, some of the importance of learning from history.
So quick. Could you tell us any transitions related to the privacy history to become modernized and in this space?
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