“Free of Mind, Though I Am a Refugee”: Borderless Graduate Education and the Politics of Knowledge Production

This paper is about the politics of policy knowledge production. It calls for spaces to be forged to allow teachers’ voices to have centre stage in knowledge creation and production. Specifically, this paper discusses the need for alternative ways of conducting educational research so that power in research design is utilised as a capacity for change. First, the politics of knowledge production is explored. The second and most central task of this paper is to highlight the role that teachers’ knowledge can play in shaping education policy through emancipatory research practices. Overall, this paper advocates that the time has arrived for a fresh look at teachers’ participation in the production and validation of knowledge. Valuing teachers’ embodied knowledge and the unique position teachers hold within the education system, this paper is a window on the present, and suggests the direction the conversation should take in order to move education policy beyond the endless accumulation of evidence towards impactful change.

This article explores the murkiness of fieldwork and writing that often comes with simultaneous positioning as insider/outsider. I engage with two key themes: First, identity, legitimacy and representation and, second, the gray spaces between theory and reality. The first theme examines the contradictions of being perceived as both an insider and outsider; the complexities of identity and language while at ‘home’ in the field, and the challenges of performing the native informant role while back ‘home’ in Canada. The second theme explores the uncomfortable dilemma of engaging with the ‘Rush to Theory’ from the global south. I will examine how the theories are sophisticated and provocative, yet prove unsatisfactory in terms of having practical applications. I conclude the article by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, transnational subjects invariably contribute to the creation of a new politics of knowledge production and to the attainment of social justice.

What does it mean to study places in ‘crisis’ and how does that affect the research done on the ‘rural’? To be considered to be in crisis is not really new as any literature review of rural studies indicates. And yet, we live now in a new context, with new challenges for ‘rural’ research, in particular that of sustainability. Sustainability is the new policy focus and is increasingly reflected in research on rural Europe. Although scholars are beginning to theorize on what is sustainable in and for rural areas, our intention is to take this further. We theorize on what the focus on crisis and, increasingly on sustainability, means for the research we do and the knowledge we produce on rural Europe. Our aim is to bring attention to the politics of past and present knowledge production on the rural to be able to imagine just and sustainable futures. In an analysis of literature primarily from Sweden and the UK, we argue that two construals, that of a rural crisis and that of rural–urban polarization, have set the tone for rural studies and may have overshadowed a more plural approach. We outline what might be needed from rural research to meet future challenges and what the notion of sustainability, with its emphasis on the entanglements of the social, economic and environmental, might mean for the future of rural research.

BackgroundRefugees' parenting behaviour is profoundly influenced by their mental health, which is, in turn, influenced by their situation of displacement. Our research presents the first systematic review on parenting and mental health in protracted refugee situations, where 78% of all refugees reside. MethodsWe pre-registered our protocol and screened documents in 22 languages from 10 electronic databases, reports by 16 international humanitarian organisations and region-specific content from the top 100 websites for each of the 72 countries that ‘host’ protracted refugees. Our criteria were empirical papers reporting parenting and parental mental health data on refugees who are in a protracted refugee situation. Studies including only internally displaced or stateless persons were excluded. ResultsA total of 18,125 documents were screened and 30 studies were included. We identified a universal pathway linking macro-level stressors in protracted refugee situations, such as movement restrictions and documentation issues, to symptoms of depression and anxiety, which, in turn, led to negative parenting practices. Additionally, culture-specific pathways were observed in the way parental mental health and parenting were expressed. Situational (e.g., overcrowding) and relational factors (e.g., spousal dynamics) modulated both of these pathways. Biases in the research included the over-representation of specific protracted refugee situations, overreliance on self-reported data, and a heavy focus on mothers while neglecting fathers and other caregivers. Longitudinal research is needed to clarify the directionality and causality between specific macro-level stressors in a given protracted refugee situation and parental mental health and practices. Refugees were rarely consulted or involved in the design of research concerning their parenting and parental mental health. ConclusionIn recognising the existing links between protracted refugee situations, parental mental health, and parenting, our systematic review calls for a shift in thinking: from focusing solely on the micro aspects that affect ‘refugee parenting’ to understanding and tackling the broader macro-level stressors that drive them. We urge larger and long-term research efforts that consider diverse protracted refugee situations, greater investment in science communication and diplomacy with governments, and stronger implementation of durable solutions by states to alleviate the roots of refugee parents' distress and negative parenting practices.

Access to quality education is a fundamental element of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4), particularly for refugees enduring prolonged displacement, such as those residing in the Dadaab and Kakuma Refugee Camps in Kenya. While education projects are critical in advancing inclusive and equitable learning opportunities in emergency contexts, many such programs encounter persistent challenges, often stemming from fiscal and programmatic constraints. However, a review of the literature reveals limited empirical research on how fiscal and programmatic strategies affect the long-term sustainability of these education initiatives. The study addresses these knowledge gaps by focusing on the sustainability of non-profit-led education projects in Kenyan refugee camps, thereby contributing to the evidence base necessary for achieving SDG 4 in refugee settings. The objectives of this study were to examine the influence of fiscal monitoring, social financing, financial adequacy, and funding diversification on the sustainability of education projects in refugee camps in Kenya. The study employed a descriptive research design, collecting data through questionnaires and key informant interviews with a diverse group of education stakeholders, including 13 school principals, 42 head teachers, 78 boards of management (BOM) members, 35 education officers, 25 program managers, and 5 education directors. Correlation and regression analyses were conducted to assess the relationships and predictive power of each fiscal programmatic strategy. Correlation analysis revealed that fiscal monitoring (r = .978, p < .001), social financing (r = .935, p < .001), financial adequacy (r = .978, p < .001), and funding diversification (r = .799, p < .001) each showed strong positive associations with project sustainability. However, regression analysis demonstrated that only fiscal monitoring (β = 0.377, p = 0.000), social financing (β = 0.240, p = 0.000), and financial adequacy (β = 0.265, p = 0.044) remained statistically significant independent predictors when accounting for all variables, while funding diversification was not significant (β = 0.039, p = 0.728). Consequently, the study concludes that fiscal monitoring, social financing, and financial adequacy are key determinants of sustainable education projects in refugee contexts. This study recommends the implementation of comprehensive fiscal programmatic strategies, with a particular focus on robust fiscal monitoring by auditors, ensuring financial adequacy, and the integration of social finance programs such as school meals and cash transfers. To enhance funding diversification, the formation of multi-functional teams to conduct participatory assessments, aligning community needs with donor motivations, is also advised. These recommendations aim to strengthen project success and support the long-term sustainability of education initiatives in refugee settings.

Ageing as a refugee in an unsettled life situation increases the need for identity management due to dramatic life changes. This qualitative study, influenced by phenomenology, focuses on the stories of older adults in protracted intra-African refugee situations and the continuity and discontinuity of their identities. In line with identity process theory, we portray identities as situationally accomplished through the interplay of how one defines oneself internally and how others define one from the outside. The data, analysed by using abductive thematic analysis, consist of five semi-structured interviews with refugees in protracted refugee situations in Nairobi. We argue that older age combined with protracted migratory experiences resulted in the study participants possessing a wide array of experiences, including many losses. These, including their pre-migratory experiences, formed a large repertoire of intra-psychic, interpersonal and intergroup coping strategies to rely on when reworking their identities.

Editors’ Note Darius Bost, Wanda S. Pillow, and Kimberly M. Jew This issue—consisting of general essays and a special section on “Pandemic Time”—addresses in various ways the politics of knowledge production. From former President Trump’s promotion of “alternative facts” that continue to pose a threat to US democracy to the post-pandemic “misinformation” that has impacted health outcomes, the politics of knowledge production and distortion has become a pressing political matter. Feminist scholars have made significant contributions to the politics of knowledge production in times of crisis, and this issue continues this important work. Angela Towne’s essay, “A Feminist Sexology Perspective on the Multifunctional Clitoris: Dispelling the Sole Purpose Myth,” demonstrates how progressive efforts to celebrate the clitoris’s functional role in sexual pleasure have inadvertently foreclosed its multifunctionality. Meg Perret’s “‘Transgender Frogs Turn Your Son Gay’: Endangered Amphibians, Estrogenic Pollution, and Male Extinction” tracks the scientific rhetoric and attendant moral panic regarding the effects of the herbicide Atrazine on the gender and sex of frogs. While inflammatory rhetoric claiming that the drug “feminizes” frogs may at first appear to reify binary notions of gender and sex, Perret demonstrates how it might also affirm gender and sexual diversity. In “Gender and Race in John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women,” Aurélie Knüfer revisits this canonical philosophical text to argue that Mill uses the comparison of enslaved women and English married women not to draw connections between the causes of racism and sexism, but to dissociate them. Alison Kibler recovers three television shows in the mid-1970s that engage Black feminist issues. Kibler argues that recovering and analyzing these shows broadens our understanding of feminist television activism by privileging Black women’s perspectives. The special section, “Pandemic Time,” continues the issue’s emphasis on the politics of knowledge production by engaging the question, how has the [End Page ix] coronavirus pandemic altered our perceptions of time? The scholars and artists included in this special section draw from feminist, queer, Indigenous, Black diasporic, Latinx, and other epistemologies to challenge universalist conceptions of time. While they acknowledge that the coronavirus pandemic occasioned a monumental shift in how time is experienced, they foreground alternative ways of knowing that might enrich our understanding of what it means to live in pandemic time. In so doing, they expose the forms of marginalization and violence that have occurred through normative logics of time. “Pandemic Time” begins with a critical introduction by Darius Bost, who invited the contributors to participate in this special section. The introduction is followed by the roundtable, “When We’re Coming From: What Would an HIV Doula Do? On Pandemic Time(s).” The What Would an HIV Doula Do? Collective is a group of activists, scholars, and artists who are committed to responding to the ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic. Approaching HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 from a range of perspectives, the eight members of the collective included here place the categories “pandemic” and “time” in productive tension and provide novel ways to approach the question of how the pandemic has altered our senses of time. We learn from this collective how pandemics move in and out of time; that time is bent, flickering, syndemic. Because global health crises overlap with capitalism’s crises, time-is-money. Though we may be in pandemic time for the long haul, they illustrate how marginalized communities possess historical knowledge of crises through which we might survive and thrive in pandemic time—what one collective member calls palimpsesting. The roundtable is followed by the Somali-Canadian artist Abdi Osman’s series of drawings, Modern Primitive. Osman’s series of color drawings extend the public health practice of social distancing to consider the broader social divisions that have been exacerbated by the pandemic. Osman’s character studies prompt us to reflect on what it means to live together when existing social hierarchies and the discourse that maintain them have forced us apart. The following essays ask, how we come to know what it means to live in pandemic time, and how we convey that knowledge. Will Mosley’s “On the Lateness of Pandemic Time” deploys the Black queer vernacular term “late” as...

This article takes Bangladesh as a case study and explores the motivations (or lack of), challenges, and politics of knowledge production with a particular focus on development scholarship and practice. This piece is based on qualitative research methods and draws from 25 semi structured interviews with highly experienced and senior Bangladeshi development practitioners and academics. Empirical evidence and consequent analysis presented in this work contribute to the debates around the schism in access to resources, politics of aid, and power over knowledge production. This article also reveals local cultural contexts as consultancy works are perceived to be more financially rewarding. This is manifested through current practices that have created a condition where local researchers and practitioners feel they have no time (or incentive and motivation) to engage in knowledge production. Moreover, this article explores whether one’s race and/or nationality play any role in knowledge production, and how the respondents reflect about these issues based on their lived experience. In doing so, findings of this study further the arguments of structural inequality and colour-blind approach within aid and global development landscape. This article offers a rich account of how existing practices favour staff members from the donor countries and exclude Bangladeshi researchers and practitioners from knowledge production processes. This article also brings forward an important issue which highlights that, as perceived by the respondents of this study, one’s institutional affiliation with prestigious Western institutions might matter more in knowledge production (as we know it) than the content, ideas and credibility of knowledge that are generated in the global South. This article contends that by excluding, rejecting, side-lining, and subjugating knowledges produced in the global South development policies and practices will continue to manufacture a particular type of knowledge that will circumvent equity in knowledge production and perpetuate Western hegemony.

Background/Aims Community health volunteers are used in healthcare in low- and middle-income countries around the world, based on the idea of task-shifting. Task-shifting is a strategy for making efficient use of human resources, addressing the health worker shortage and increasing universal access to healthcare. This strategy has been adopted in the Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya to provide healthcare services to refugees. The role of community health volunteers in maternal healthcare in the refugee camp has not been clearly described. This study aimed to determine the roles of community health volunteers in providing maternal education and promoting birth preparedness in the Dadaab refugee camp, Kenya. Methods This mixed-method descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at the IFO-1 camp, in the Dadaab refugee complex. Simple random and purposive sampling were used to recruit 74 community health volunteers and five key informants (sector heads of department working with community health volunteers) respectively. The participants were interviewed using questionnaires and key informant interviews. Data were analysed descriptively and thematically. Results The community health volunteers provided education services: maternal education was provided by 93% of the community health volunteers who participated in the study. All respondents engaged women and families in birth preparations and conducted home visits, with 66 (89%) community health volunteers conducting more than two antenatal care home visits per client and assessing birth preparedness levels. However, there were variations in training on maternal healthcare and birth preparation information, with 21 (28%) of the community health volunteers having no training at all. Conclusions Despite a lack of training, community health volunteers played a significant role in supporting the provision of maternal health services in the Dadaab refugee camp through health education and promotion of birth preparedness. Community health volunteers need training on maternal healthcare to strengthen community maternal health education and birth preparedness.

This chapter focuses on the politics of knowledge production in South African universities, which were spaces of White dominance and racial segregation during the colonial and apartheid era. I argue that even though South Africa may have abolished apartheid laws, racial inequalities still manage to find themselves at the center of most social practices, this includes social practices like conducting research at South African universities. As such, I offer a critical reflection on the significance of my identity as a Black South African academic while undertaking my on-going doctoral project. My doctoral project explores White South Africans’ perceptions of racial inequality. In particular, I focus my reflection on how during the conceptual phase of my doctoral project I experienced my Black identity as burdensome. Also, I reflect on how I experienced whiteness, prior to and during the first study of my doctoral project. In this reflection, I focus on how my identity as a Black South African scholar intersected with the legacy of institutional racism at a South African university. I conclude that South Africa’s history of racial oppression continues to have relevance at universities and this has implications for power relations in the knowledge production process.

This introductory essay to the Reviews Section of Civil Wars 25th Anniversary Special Issue explores key paradigms in the field of conflict studies, and how they have evolved, ranging from new and critical approaches to knowledge production; to conceptualisations of political violence and civil war as dynamic, relational, and potentially order-making and a new demand to centre research ethics in our work. Among other things, this introduction calls on scholars of civil wars to cultivate and maintain spaces for critical dialogue and reflection – not just on methods and findings but also on broader questions of the processes and politics of knowledge production – to ensure the health and advancement of our sub-field.

“Crowdsourcing” describes the diverse practices of online‐distributed knowledge production whereby the Web is used to host collaborative platforms that focus large volumes of information, from multiple users, toward specific tasks. Sometimes described as the “wisdom of the crowd” or “collective intelligence,” crowdsourcing was originally conceived as a model for business innovation. It has now been taken up by a range of organizations and users – from business to government, charities, and NGOs – and has come to describe different models of practice, ranging from tightly prescribed human computational tasks to looser forms of collective data‐gathering. Usually undertaken voluntarily, crowdsourcing raises questions about participants' motivation, data quality and sustainability, and also broader questions about the politics of knowledge production – as citizens rather than experts come to play a greater role in generating knowledge about our world – and the changing nature of labor markets, as salaried professionals are replaced by unpaid volunteers.

ABSTRACTIn this paper, we engage with the rising importance of journal ranking lists. We explore the pressure these place on marketing academics and the politics of knowledge production, stressing academic game-playing, careerism, and paradigmatic homogeneity. We appreciate that scholars are disciplined by these lists, their line managers, and reaffirm list power through their own patterns of self-management. Nonetheless, marketing academics should avoid making the naïve assumption that the appearance of a paper in a highly rated journal necessarily serves as a proxy for ‘quality’. Publication in a particular outlet does not transform the ultimate contribution being made in any substantive fashion. We provide an extensive critique of the function and impact of journal lists. However, it is also recognised that these are very important for members of the marketing community. As such, we explain our reasons for contesting the recent regrading of the Journal of Marketing Management (JMM) by a prominent journal list and underline the changes that have been made to the Journal since the beginning of the current editorial term. Finally, the support of prominent scholars among our thought community for the policies being implemented is highlighted and we underscore the rigour of contributions to the Journal, the review process, the rising citations, downloads and truly global readership of the JMM.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made historical and contemporary colonial relationships between and within states more fraught. This complexity is apparent within the research process itself, adding a new dimension to debates on positionality and the politics of knowledge production. Drawing on critical approaches to International Relations, and in dialogue with an emerging literature on the implications of the pandemic for knowledge decolonization, we reflect on our experience as scholars from the UK/Ireland researching colonial legacy and Transitional Justice in Colombia. The aim of this autoethnographic article is to suggest how the COVID-19 pandemic affected inequalities between researchers based in Europe and participants in Latin America. Our findings are mixed. While Covid-related funding cuts undermined equity within relationships, the virtual field offered an opportunity to cultivate cooperation between researcher and participant and re-think issues of ethics, voice, and the research agenda itself. Finally, El Maestro Covid taught us valuable lessons on the colonial trap inherent in our endeavors.

Asylum bureaucracies in Europe are undergoing processes of digitalisation, including the use of new digital data sources to inform decision-making in refugee status determination. The extraction of asylum seekers’ smartphone data, based on new policies across Europe, testifies to an intensified struggle for epistemic authority and reignites questions about the politics of knowledge production. The aim of this article is twofold. First, it demonstrates that the governmentalisation of digital archives predates formal policies for smartphone examinations. Drawing on empirical data from Austria, Germany and Switzerland, including court files, policy documents and expert interviews, the paper identifies the epistemic strategies deployed by asylum decision-makers in relation to smartphone data and discusses (dis)continuities in relation to the new policy-based procedures. Second, the article contributes to the literature on the politics of knowledge production in asylum governance by placing the findings into the context of Foucauldian governmentality studies. I argue that while the governmentalisation of personal digital archives reinforces well-established insecuritisation processes in asylum, it critically relies on a novel form of power, namely what Isin and Ruppert call ‘sensory power’.