Connecting Knowledge Production and Praxis

Abstract

This chapter investigates the connections between knowledge production and practice in equality work by tracking the dynamics of the circulation and generation of feminist and gender knowledges. Based on a mixed-methods study on training for gender equality in the European region, the chapter covers three connections. First, the professional development trajectories of trainers and their current roles illustrate how collaborating actors situated across a diversity of interrelated sites circulate knowledge between them to shape collective production and practice. Second, the translation and communication of threshold concepts—sex/gender and intersectionality—to training participants demonstrate how knowledge is contested and reworked through practice to shape knowledge production and exchange. Lastly, the learning processes of the participants, and trainers, demonstrate the multidirectionality of the circulation of gender and feminist knowledges, and how this can shape both the knowledge that is produced and future praxis. Overall, these examples illustrate how current practice is situated within a transnational genealogy, mobilising incremental change through collective and collaborative effort. The actors in these processes are engaged in a dynamic of circulation between knowledge production and practice over time. Through this investigation I argue for a relational understanding of knowledge generation, whereby the dynamics of cooperation and contest are integral to developing and facilitating transformative praxis.