Circulation Of Knowledge Research Articles

The idea of “mechanology” through the 20th century. The production, reception, and circulation of anatopic knowledge

Cet article retrace la production, réception et circulation de l’ouvrage Réflexions sur la science des machines, de Jacques Lafitte, paru en 1932. En complément des nombreux travaux qui ont abordé la valeur théorique des idées véhiculées dans cet ouvrage, cet article propose de suivre le parcours géographique du livre. Dans la première partie, l’article introduit la notion de connaissance en transit, proposée par James Secord, et celle des lieux de savoir de Christian Jacob. Ensuite, en suivant le cas de Réflexions sur la science des machines, l’article s’engage à analyser les conditions matérielles qui ont permis à l’idée de mécanologie de circuler pendant près d’un siècle. Enfin, l’article introduit le concept de « savoir anatopique » pour expliquer la trajectoire parfois ambiguë de l’ouvrage. Cet article contribue, dans un premier temps, à approfondir l’histoire du champ de la philosophie des techniques en proposant une relecture des lieux et des artefacts via lesquels l’idée de mécanologie a émergé et circulé. Dans un deuxième temps, l’article contribue aussi aux débats en histoire des sciences en mettant au travail, méthodologiquement et épistémologiquement, les cadres analytiques de la connaissance en transit et des lieux de savoir.

The transit of plants: circulation of medical knowledge and practices in South America during the Modern Era.

From records on plants and herbs made by doctors, healers, missionaries, and colonial administrators in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this article explores ways of constructing knowledge about flora using the concept of circulation proposed by Kapil Raj. The distinct experiences and documents analyzed demonstrate the process of observing, collecting, systematizing, and circulating knowledge, and the influence of natural history and the Hippocratic tradition on the classification of herbs and plants and on the descriptions adopted in these texts. From printed books to notes scattered through travel diaries, usefulness of these species to humankind was the element valued by those who directly observed the potential of American plants, fruits, and herbs.

Legacies of boldness: Caldas, Humboldt and knowledge about cinchonas, 1801-1821.

This article examines the circulation of knowledge about Cinchona plants. Francisco José de Caldas and Alexander von Humboldt were interested in their taxonomy, distribution, trade, exploitation, production and conservation. The former's observations were better, but his contributions were silenced by Humboldt and other actors such as José Celestino Mutis. Caldas changed from a passive position of accepted subordination to one of self-advocacy, but his arguments were not widely publicized, in part because his results did not favor commercial interests and he lacked connections. Caldas used similar techniques to Humboldt to appropriate and systematize knowledge about cinchonas, silencing various sources.

Jumping the Gap: developing an innovative product from a Social Network Analysis perspective

The creation of new products from the bonding between science and industry incorporates aspects that can be reviewed based on the nature of the academy-business bonds, the structure of the science & technology systems, or the models of academy-industry articulation. This research proposes a novel approach based on the analysis of a case study and uses the perspective of social network analysis to reconstruct the academic-state-business links necessary for the generation of innovation. The main source of data was the narration of a key informant, taking the innovative product as the ego of the network. Knowledge circulation pathways were identified, as well as subgroups of nodes whose attributes are associated with the product's transfer, development, and financing actions. The actor with the highest degree of centrality in the network belongs to the academic sector, and he operated as a bridge that bonded the academic and state sectors. This could be an indication that the promotion of this type of profile within the academic sector could boost the development of innovative products based on scientific knowledge.

India’s counterinsurgency knowledge: theorizing global position in wars on terror

ABSTRACT Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on dominant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counterinsurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reducible to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial histories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.

Circulation and containment in the knowledge-based economy: Transnational education zones in Dubai and Qatar

Our analysis focuses on evolving global capitalism's production of high-skilled temporary migrant labour through the technology of special economic zones. Drawing on debates in economic geography on zones as globalised spaces of production and interdisciplinary scholarship on economic transformation in the Arabian Peninsula, we interrogate a relatively new type of zone that agglomerates foreign higher education institutions: transnational education zones. We conceptualise these zones as a distinct form of exceptional space produced by aspirations for a knowledge-based economy. Transnational education zones provide financial benefits and legal exemptions to state territory for international higher education investors who operate offshore campuses. By conducting a situated empirical analysis of transnational education zones’ logics and mechanisms in Dubai and Qatar, we show how these zones function as sites of circulation and containment that allow governments to harness globally circulating people and institutions for building a knowledge-based economy, while aiming to contain their social and political impact locally. While the underlying contradictions of simultaneous circulation and containment of knowledge and knowledge workers are modulated by the exceptional character of the zones, they cannot be fully resolved. In many ways, transnational education zones constitute a continuation of established strategies for economic development by exception that have been pursued by governments in the Gulf, which aim for global connectivity and rely heavily on controlling a temporary and contingent migrant workforce.

Chains of Participation in Producing Biodiversity Infrastructures: Digital Reconfigurations of Scientific Work

ABSTRACT A remarkable developments in science over the past thirty years has been the development of large databases that support knowledge production, representation and circulation. Increasingly, chains of instruments, people and devices are involved in compiling, organizing and documenting biodiversity data collections. Several digital participatory science initiatives studied between 2013 and 2017 illustrates the diversity of amateur participation using digital technologies at every step of the knowledge process – from contributing local field observations, to identifying species, quality control and validation, to digitizing plant specimens for inclusion in transnational databases. Collaborative platforms and databases emerge as elements that are endowed with a certain performativity through the ordering possibilities they suggest or impose. Attending to practices in these contexts raises questions about organizational innovations and novel forms of division of labor in participatory science. The participation of large numbers of people with varied backgrounds and expertise results in a distributed and less linear type of biodiversity science. As the product of numerous interventions, data are best seen as relational; their authorship or ownership need not be their defining characteristic. Indeed, the data generating technologies and practices of participatory science initiatives themselves generate a kind of untethered relational potential that deserves exploration.

Cartography in Translation between Ouro Preto and Gotha, c.1850–1860

ABSTRACT Based on archival research, this article analyses the publishing history of the map of Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the Petermanns Mitteilungen journal. Commissioned by the provincial government between 1836 and 1855, this map was drawn up by two German army officers who had emigrated to Brazil. In 1859 the Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob von Tschudi acted as an intermediary between the Brazilian authorities and the German publishing house Perthes in Gotha. The editorial process reflects both the transatlantic circulation of maps and geographical knowledge and the creation of a global community of map readers and users in the German-speaking context in the mid-nineteenth century.

Cultivating Ongoingness Through Site-Specific Arts Research and Public Engagement

In this article, I consider the contributions of projects in Latin America to the need “to think in the presence of ongoing facts of destruction”, and to imagine and design forms of “ongoingness” amid socioenvironmental challenges and conflicts. I focus on HAWAPI, Ensayos and EnlaceArq, three initiatives that have consolidated a decade of site-specific, practice research that departs from the arts to devise methods that bridge the arts, sciences, and communities to confront socioenvironmental pressures and enduring injustices caused by colonial legacies and continued extractivism. How does site-specific practice research seed and cultivate inter- and transdisciplinary collaborations around pressing socioenvironmental concerns affecting Latin America? How do projects establish critical relationships regarding the circulation of knowledges related to these issues and engage with diverse types of publics? And, insofar as the projects reviewed here often operate on the fringes of academia, what strengths and challenges does this generate for their sustainability over time and their impact on scholarly research, public conversations and the lives of specific communities?

John Tanner, Colonial Credulity, and Comparative Religions: Theorizing Religion on the Borderlands of U.S. Empire

ABSTRACTThis essay explores the human stakes of theorizing religion in the early nineteenth century, on the borderlands of an expanding U.S. empire. It does so through the lens of a single text, A Narrative of the Captivity and Adventures of John Tanner (U.S. Interpreter at the Saut de Ste. Marie) during Thirty Years Residence among the Indians. Published in 1830, the Narrative offers an entrée into the circulation of knowledge and debates about religion among Native Americans and white settlers in a time and place from which we have little record of such debates. Tanner joined in the Midewiwin of the Ojibwe and cultivated the Anishinaabe practice of medicine hunting; held back his own skepticism, perhaps retrospectively exaggerated, at the messages of those he called “Indian prophets”; and discussed the differences, solidified in the telling, between white and Indigenous religions. His editor, Edwin James, meanwhile, drew on comparative scholarship about mythology and religion around the world to defend his own preferred theories about the religious and racial character of Indigenous peoples. Religion has long been theorized far beyond the academy and the centers of empire. Relatively unfamiliar accounts, like Tanner's, reveal how everyday people have engaged with these theories and the consequences of these theories on the ground. Tanner's Narrative, in short, usefully illuminates the webs of knowledge about religion in early America and its human stakes for people caught in the crosshairs of a transforming imperial world.

The South American medical communities in the genesis of the tropical medicine: construction and circulation of knowledge on American leishmaniasis in the beginning of the twentieth century

AbstractThis article aims to demonstrate how researchers from different South American countries took part in the process of globalisation of the tropical medicine paradigm, through research on leishmaniasis found in this region. The main objective of the present article is to highlight the role of these researchers, as well as of their scientific institutions, in a global history of tropical medicine which surpassed European borders and its imperialistic practices. At the same time, it will be identified the renewal of the tropical medicine paradigm in the South American context. During the beginning of the twentieth century, leishmaniasis became an important health issue in tropical areas, whereas the mere usage of the repertoire of the medical knowledge, produced in Europe up until that time, revealed itself as an insufficient instrument to help solve the problem. Hereupon, this matter was, above all, an open discussion, which required great skills and refined techniques of tropical medicine for its study. For this reason, it enabled the members of the regional medical communities to establish vigorous communication channels with medical centres, located in other continents, that had already been giving much deserved importance to leishmaniasis as an exciting scientific theme.

The Art of Translating among the Chinese of Java

Translation plays an essential role in the circulation of knowledge as well as in the social and political exchanges. Yet it remains little studied by historians. Here we propose to reflect on how the VOC administrators communicated their orders to the Batavian Chinese through the study of the interpretative translation of a 1696 decree aimed at prohibiting the opening of new sugar, arak, lime and brick production sites, as well as the creation of sawmills, due to the shortage of firewood in the Batavian ommelanden or in the surrounding regions, but which was not implemented due to the powerful interests at stake.

Photography: Science, Technology, and Practice in Nineteenth-Century Canada

Drawing upon empirical research from a larger project on photography in nineteenth-century British North America, this essay proceeds from the conviction that photography—as science, as technology, as practice—warrants closer scrutiny for the ways in which it contributed to the creation and circulation of knowledge in mid-to-late nineteenth-century Canada. Based on surviving images as well as those known only from the written record, this foray into the entwined histories of photography, science, and technology, while far from comprehensive, is intended to open up new directions for further study by historians of science and technology.

Translocality in the Circulation of Plants and Knowledge: Which Perspectives for Agricultural Systems Resilience?

Translocality in the Circulation of Plants and Knowledge: Which Perspectives for Agricultural Systems Resilience?

Between Democracy and Technocracy: Ecology as Multidisciplinary Science in the Transpacific Cold War

This paper investigates the circulation of ecological knowledge and practices between North America and Southeast Asia via ecologists’ involvement in the politics of science during the Transpacific Cold War. Historians have documented how American scientists in the early Cold War (1945–1965) faced the contradiction between their apparent ‘freedom’ to conduct research compared to scientists in socialist countries, on the one hand, and the imperative to depoliticise the connection between their research and the military-industrial complex, on the other hand. Historians have also shown how the environmental, civil rights and antiwar movements severely challenged this apolitical science by the late 1960s. The popularisation of ecology and its convergence with environmental politics after the 1970s are often viewed as part of this trend of repoliticising science in North America.

Language Boundaries, Publishing, and Power

Abstract Applied anthropologists in the English-speaking world tend to disregard publications in other languages; institutions emphasize English-language publishing and give less credence or value to work in other languages. Even applied anthropologists writing in non-English languages often privilege English sources. The invisibility of non-English applied anthropology diminishes the richness of our field, as we miss opportunities to gain insights from different academic, practice, and cultural traditions. This paper, based on a panel held at the 2021 SfAA Meetings, presents reflections on the challenges of language in the circulation of global knowledge for anthropological practice. We highlight the power relations embedded in language, as well as opportunities for applied anthropologists to promote communication and collaboration across boundaries.

Circulation of objects, people, and technical knowledge in the Salado River Wetland, Argentina

Resumen En este artículo, presentamos y discutimos la presencia de una serie de innovaciones o rasgos particulares con una representación minoritaria en el conjunto cerámico del río Salado bonaerense, Argentina. Estos rasgos, los vinculamos con la cultura material de los grupos guaraníes quienes solían moverse por entornos fluviales y boscosos. En el contexto de cazadores-recolectores-pescadores de la microrregión del río Salado durante el Holoceno tardío, la incorporación de elementos de la tradición tecnológica guaraní, supuso la existencia de escenarios de interacción con estos grupos horticultores. Teniendo en cuenta los resultados obtenidos, proponemos que los contactos pudieron darse a partir del primer milenio de nuestra era, es decir, desde los momentos tempranos de la expansión meridional guaraní. La interacción entre estos grupos implicó la existencia de amplias redes de intercambio que se reflejó en la circulación y aceptación de bienes, ideas o personas. Planteamos que estas relaciones intergrupales no implicaron cambios o variaciones tecnológicas estructurales ni produjeron el desplazamiento o la eliminación de las bandas locales.

Folk science, science communication and Science Education: elements of circulation and textualization of scientific knowledge

Resumo: Neste artigo apresentamos um modelo teórico que toma a Divulgação Científica como parte de um processo amplo de produção, circulação e textualização do conhecimento científico. Assim, realizamos uma articulação entre Ludwick Fleck, um autor do campo da epistemologia, e Authier-Revuz, uma autora do campo da linguagem. Com Fleck buscamos compreender as características textuais e papéis epistemológicos de diferentes textos na produção dos fatos científicos, aprofundando sua noção de ciência popular. Com Authier-Revuz, destacamos aspectos sobre um ponto de vista discursivo para a Divulgação Científica. Nossa perspectiva critica visões unidirecionais sobre a Divulgação da Ciência e destaca o papel constitutivo desse tipo de textualização na produção e manutenção dos conhecimentos científicos, em movimentos bidirecionais entre ciência e público. Essa articulação teórica se mostrou profícua para refletir sobre aspectos da Divulgação Científica, o lugar que ocupa, social e epistemologicamente, na produção da ciência, e para derivar implicações para a Educação Científica.

Entscheidungsautoritäten und elementare Akteure des „Weltsports“: Pfade einer Kulturgeschichte der Schiedsrichter

These days, referees and umpires are considered to be indispensable protagonists in modern sport. But despite their crucial significance for sport, historical scholarship has so far hardly considered their history. This article demonstrates why it is worth dealing with the cultural history of referees and umpires, in what ways this can be done, and what insights such an approach potentially offers. Empirically, the article focuses on football and tennis, while advocating the combination of questions of the history of sports with those pertaining to general history. It suggests several paths of investigation for this purpose. One finding is that the history of referees and umpires provides insights into the emergence and development of a decision-making authority in modern societies. Here, different forms and variants of the circulation of knowledge and processes of globalisation can be highlighted. In the second part, the article examines an important building block of this story. Here, the formation and entrenchment of international refereeing courses in football between 1948 and the mid-1970s will bring together the article’s programmatic objectives and empirical observations. It will trace which actors led the charge in establishing the courses, how they fostered the global dissemination and standardization of refereeing knowledge, and to what extent they contributed to expanding the boundaries of world football as a global arena of competitive comparison.

The Influence of Network Location on Knowledge Hiding from the Perspective of Lifelong Education.

Inhibiting negative knowledge behavior is one of the ways to improve the effective circulation of knowledge within the organization. This study puts employees' knowledge hiding behavior in the organizational relationship network situation and discusses the influence of network location on knowledge hiding, exploring the moderating role of knowledge acquisition in the relationship between network location and knowledge hiding. From the perspective of social network, 232 knowledge-based employees were used to obtain the data, and we used literature analysis, social network analysis, multiple regression analysis, UCINET, SPSS, and other software packages. Research shows that employees in the central network are less willing to do knowledge hiding behavior, and those in the structural hole network tend to do knowledge hiding behavior. Knowledge acquisition as the supply way of knowledge resources plays a positive role on the negative relationship between centrality and knowledge hiding and on the positive relationship between structure hole and knowledge hiding. The research results have positive significance for understanding and mastering the hiding behavior law of individual knowledge in the organizational relationship network and also provide certain theoretical basis and data support for organizational knowledge governance.