Circulation Of Knowledge Research Articles

Emily Pawley. The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North.

We live in an era where the mistrust of science is widespread. In The Nature of the Future: Agriculture, Science, and Capitalism in the Antebellum North, historian Emily Pawley transports readers to a time and place where the reception of scientific experimentation and the circulation of expert knowledge were less encumbered by politically driven skepticism. Although her agenda is far-reaching, Pawley confines her scope and scale to antebellum New York State between the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the beginning of the Civil War in 1861. During these four tumultuous decades, the rural communities of North America’s agricultural epicenter were connected to a sprawling network of agrarian expertise. The architects of this knowledge were “improvers,” a diverse array of scientifically informed agriculturalists who dedicated their careers to the creation of landscapes that could produce colossal yields for far-flung capitalist markets. As Pawley succinctly puts it, “‘Improvement’ or ‘agricultural improvement’ was by this period a powerful system of knowledge making that manifested itself most clearly in the agricultural journals and fairs where agricultural monsters were displayed” (5). These “monsters” included a 975-pound pig, a 2,546-pound ox, and a strawberry with a girth of 8.5 inches. Agricultural prodigies of this magnitude were the realized ambitions of human efforts to transform nature into a storehouse of commodities.

Whales Lost and Found

Worldwide, whales have been hunted to the brink of extinction. In Brazil, whaling was a royal monopoly between 1614 and 1801. Within the dynamics of the Portuguese Empire, it was a stimulus that promoted wealth and the circulation of knowledge, practices, and products. The development of whaling stations in four coastal sites fostered the construction of littoral spaces, shaped the ways people perceived and used the ocean and marine animals, and left an impact on whale populations in a truly entangled history between humans and the non-human world. In this article, we aim to identify the main target species and number of animals caught through the analysis of historical sources from the 17th and 18th centuries. Southern Right Whale and Humpback Whale were the main target species, to a different extent, between the north-eastern and south-eastern whaling sites, but occasionally hunted simultaneously. We accounted for a total of 9080 animals captured in 41 years, between 1627 and 1801, and addressed hunting loss and calf-securing practices. In discussing biodiversity loss in the era of the Anthropocene, we expect to contribute to a better understanding of early impacts on marine life in the 1600-1800 period. Funding This paper had the support of CHAM (NOVA FCSH / UAc), through the strategic project sponsored by FCT (UIDB/04666/2020). The author was sponsored by a PhD scholarship by FCT (SFRH/BD/104932/2014). This study has received funding from the European project CONCHA (EU H2020-MSCA-RISE-2017 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 777998) and the European Research Council (ERC) Synergy Grant 4-Oceans (European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement Nº 951649). It has also received support from the UNESCO Chair ‘The Oceans’ Cultural Heritage’, OPI-Oceans Past Initiative, and APCM-Associação Para as Ciências do Mar.

Supporting smallholder acacia farmers in Viet Nam to transition to sawlog production: Opportunities and challenges

Acacia plantations are a significant forestry resource in Viet Nam, with the majority of the area under smallholder ownership, typically with 1–5 ha per household. Currently most acacias are grown in short rotations and sold for export as woodchips. Short rotation plantations suit smallholder farmers as they can receive a return relatively quickly (within 4–5 years). However the country has a high reliance on imports of sawlogs, some of which could be substituted by growing acacias to sawlog size on longer (5–10 year) rotations. Thus the Vietnamese government has developed a strategy to encourage smallholder acacia farmers to convert to sawlog production from their acacia estate. Sawlog production could potentially give greater returns to growers but also requires enhanced silvicultural management, greater tolerance of risk and longer times for return on investment. We explored smallholder farmers' preferences for support programs if they are to adopt longer rotation plantations in two contrasting provinces: Thua Thien Hue in Central Viet Nam and Hoa Binh in North Viet Nam. We found that farmers are happy to embrace longer rotations if they could source finance, are able to handle larger sized logs and if they could see others also growing longer rotations. We also explored the effects of contrasting training styles on adoption of best management practices (BMPs) – either standard top-down extension training, or a more collaborative active-learning extension training approach. We found that a collaborative, active-learning approach led to greater adoption of BMPs, but also that the traditional approach to extension was almost as effective. There is significant demand amongst the growers to improve their silvicultural management, and they are very responsive to training and knowledge circulation amongst the community. Factors influencing farmers' adoption of acacia BMPs were also identified and they included intrinsic factors (such as farmers' goals and inspirations), extrinsic factors (such as farm location and satisfaction with acacias) as well as extension. Extrinsic factors (21.5%), intrinsic factors (7.0%) and extension (5.5%) explained a total of 34% of the variation in adoption behaviour at 9 months following training. Farmers in the study demonstrated that they had the capacity, ability and willingness to uptake BMPs but to encourage greater adoption, extension training should be complemented with other support incentives such as seedlings or fertiliser subsidies to bridge the financial gap that some poorer farmers face. Extending acacia rotations to 7 years carries additional risks to farmers and many farmers would require financial assistance to facilitate acceptance of these risks.

Ethical approach to translation memory reuse: discussions from copyright and business ethics perspectives

ABSTRACT Under existing copyright provisions, translation memories are protected as “composite works” comprised of source texts and their translations, or as “databases” when created with a large volume of the source text and target text pairs. Freelance translators should exercise copyright to translations in line with the “sweat of the brow” principle. However, the translation industry maintains practices that dispossess translators of translation memories and reuse them without translators’ approval. When examined based on Kant's categorical imperative, this utilitarian practice is deemed unethical since it violates individual translators’ rights. This study offers proposals for promoting the ethical reuse of translation memories. First, translations by freelancers should be excluded from works-for-hire to allow the global protection of language assets and the rights of freelancers. Second, a collective licensing regime for translation memories should be introduced to promote distributive justice and the free circulation of knowledge.

Editorial: Evolving Cosmographie

This editorial is intended to frame the special issue of the Journal of Early Modern Studies devoted to The Circulation of Cosmographical Knowledge in Early Modern Europe. Providing early modern definitions of cosmography and differentiating between cosmography and geography, it takes stock of the latest scholarly publications on the subject and sheds light on the various contributions in this issue. In the presentation of the various sections, it emphasizes fresh perspectives and methodologies likely to open up new interpretive paths in the field of cosmography.

Romance, Cosmography and the Trading Companies: Albions England and The Preachers Travels

The article examines the circulation of cosmographical knowledge as a result of some of the less prominent, lower-class trading company travellers, often through romance or romance tropes. It focalizes some romance strategies, values and intermediaries – notably Sir John Mandeville, and the figures of the travelling hero – used to convey cosmographical knowledge in narrative form. William Warner’s Albions England (notably the 1596 edition) and John Cartwright’s The Preachers Travels (1611) are the main textual focus, each comprising a different kind of approach to cosmography and travel writing, and each, importantly, boasting a connection – personal or professional – to the trading companies. In the case of Cartwright, the article argues that his is a ‘romancified’ travel text, and the first English first-person account to attend to Shah ‘Abbas’ major building projects at Isfahan’; in the case of Warner, it shows how Mandevillean figures are engaged to support the project of heroizing English trading company travellers and mariners.

Gender Dynamics, Space, and Identity Formation in Yasmina Khadra’s What the Day Owes the Night (2008, 2011)

Yasmina Khadra’s’ ‘Ce Que le Jour Doit à la Nuit’ (What the Day Owes the Night) is an Algerian best-selling novel originally written in French. Yasmina Khadra is the non de plume of the Algerian army officer, Mohammed Moulesshoul. Moulesshoul utilised a female pseudonym to avoid the inspections of his manuscripts by the army. The version I use in this article is a translation from French by Frank Wynne (2011). Yasmina Khadra discusses the human existence in a way that seeks to determine the purpose of all life beyond one’s social condition. In other words, Yasmina Khadra perceives life as a continuum of interpersonal and intrapersonal relations that possess a strong effect on the social subjects’ existence in the world. Also, being an Algerian drives Yasmina Khadra to concentrate on issues of identity, colonialism, the production, and circulation of particular social and cultural knowledge, along with the struggle of gender and political identification. Yasmina Khadra’s narrative is a manifestation of the struggle to produce a historic national culture and a narrative discourse free of the shackles of colonialist knowledge and mode of thought. This article uses CDA and thematic analysis to critically outline and investigate the gender dynamics and identity formation that characterise Khadra’s narrative discourse.

Between Concealment and Disclosure: Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making

Between Concealment and Disclosure: Approaches to the History of Privacy in Knowledge-Making

Language, Science and Globalization in the Eighteenth Century.

Asia, America, and Europe have been intellectually intertwined for centuries. Several studies have been published revealing European scholars' interest in the "exotic" languages of Asia and America, as well as in ethnographic and anthropological aspects. Some scholars such as Polymath Leibniz (1646-1716), were interested in these languages in an attempt to construct a universal language, while others tried to establish language families, like the Jesuit Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809). However, all acknowledge the importance of language and the circulation of knowledge. This paper analyzes the dissemination of the compilation of eighteenth-century multilingual lexical compilations for comparative purposes as an early globalized project. These compilations were designed by European scholars and subsequently elaborated in different languages by missionaries, explorers, and scientists in the Philippines and America. Taking the correspondence and relations between botanist Mutis (1732-1808) and bureaucrats, European scientists such as polymath Humboldt (1769-1859) and Botanist Linnaeus (1707-1778) among others, and navy officers of the scientific exploration commanded by Malaspina (1754-1809) and Bustamante y Guerra (1759-1825) into consideration, I will analyze how simultaneous projects followed a unified aim, and illustrate their substantial contribution to the study of language in the late eighteenth century.

Indicators of research circulation: Localization and internationalization under scrutiny—The Cuyo Manual and its exploratory case study in Argentina

AbstractGiven the limitations of traditional scientometric indicators to recognize the diversity of circulating knowledge in different languages, formats and regions, the Research Center on the Circulation of Knowledge (CECIC-Argentina) has developed a set of research circulation analytical indicators, nucleated in the “Cuyo Manual.” This article presents the results of the first exploratory case study carried out, that of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), showing how the institution and its researchers internationalize, regionalize or territorialize their scientific productions. In addition to the articles published in internationally oriented journals, under what other formats and in which directions does research production circulate? What are the capacities installed and actions deployed by the university in terms of research circulation? These and other questions are addressed in this paper, in order to show the diversity and multiscalarity of the scientific knowledge produced, which crosses not only international and national spaces but also the closest areas of influence to the institution itself.

Shanshan Lan, “Researching race, migration, and the transnational circulation of racial knowledge: On Chinese migrants in Chicago, on African migrants in Guangzhou, and on the reconfiguration of whiteness in China”. Interview by Dominique Vidal and Si

Shanshan Lan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She has been conducting researches for nearly twenty years on Chinese migration to the United States, on Africans in the Chinese metropolis of Guangzhou and on whiteness in China. In the following interview, Shanshan Lan introduces her biographical and scholarly background, her training as an anthropologist in the United States and her distanced use of Western social sciences. She also discusses several concepts that she has developed from empirical investigations: “racial knowledge”, “overlapping racialization”, “grassroots interracial interaction”, and the difference she makes between “white privilege” and “white skin privilege”.

Doing family online: (In)formal knowledge circulation, information‐seeking practices, and support communities

AbstractObjectiveDrawing on the theory of polymedia and on the role of information and communications technology (ICT) in (re)defining the articulation between the private and the public, this introduction reflects on what ICT does to and for families around the world.BackgroundThrough the development of networking platforms, video call applications, personal sites, and collaborative information platforms, ICT has changed the way people live, love, and interact. It has also afforded new ways to “do family.”MethodBy featuring studies from a variety of national and regional contexts (Canada, Chile, Ghana, Greece, Moldova, South Korea, Ukraine, the Netherlands, United States, and Turkey), it establishes a dialogue between disciplines and a fruitful cross‐fertilization of research topics, methodologies, analyses, and theoretical perspectives.ResultsThis special issue explores (a) the nexus among family life, relationships, and ICT and (b) the relation between the everyday lived experiences of family members and the broader social structures that circumscribe the width and breadth of those experiences.ConclusionThe contributions show the porosity of the boundary between public and private spaces. Alternative forms of expertise and parenting norms are emerging online. ICTs are integrated into parents' information‐seeking and sharing practices, and emotional support. They sustain relationships between family members across distance. However, inequalities regarding access to the Internet and computer literacy still jeopardize digital citizenship and democratization.ImplicationThe contributions in this special issue highlight the need for better structuring of interventions and policies to support families by using up‐to‐date ICT systems and creating mentorship programs and digital mediation for family professionals and beneficiaries.

Mapping the Poetics of Memory: A Critical Reading of Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life as Cultural Archive

The article analyses the idea of a text as a cultural archive by mapping the question of personal and collective or social memory with particular reference to the acclaimed Bengali Dalit writer Manoranjan Byapari’s Interrogating My Chandal Life: An Autobiography of a Dalit. The memoir is a chronicler of the collective history of the marginal Namashudra community/ties of Bengal, their saga of pain and excruciating experiences of peripherality of existence that is perceived through the lens of the author. Located in the historical centre of the Dalit worldview, the autobiography investigates how the trajectories of collective histories, memories and shared identity of the Dalit community result in the emergence of what Derrida calls an ‘archive’ or a ‘palimpsest.’ Drawing on theories with regard to the role of cultural memory in the formation of a cultural archive, this article addresses questions as to how a text becomes a cultural archive and testimonies to history through the excavation and circulation of knowledge of the collective historical past.

Towards a posthumanistic knowledge production. Multimedia artistic research during the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico

ABSTRACT Although for the government officials who inaugurated the state-run Centro Multimedia (CMM) in 1994 in Mexico City it had less to do with artistic experimentation than with the promotion of a neoliberal agenda of national modernization and competitiveness, CMM has come to embody a reformulation in artistic research and education via new media. Focusing on one specific form of knowledge production that CMM promoted – the Biomediations Festival and its proposal of an open-ended Living Book – this article will conceptually frame CMM as a space of artistic research that appropriated and circulated academic knowledge. It will also argue that the way in which it translated that knowledge has strengthened the path towards what shall be termed posthumanistic knowledge circulation. CMM’s paradoxical relationship with the neoliberal agenda in which it originated made room for a posthumanistic ethos that has challenged acquired notions of author, knowledge, and ownership that are the backbone of the hegemonic global copyright laws prevailing since the rise of neoliberalism during the 1990s.

Digging deep or scratching the surface? Contingent innovation outcomes of seeking advice from geographically distant ties

Advice-seeking is an essential, daily R&D task. Therefore, the configuration of advice ties around a focal R&D worker likely determines their individual performance. Among the network dimensions considered in prior research, the geographical distance between advice providers and a focal advice seeker rarely has been investigated, despite widespread recognition that geography strongly affects knowledge circulation. To capture the effects of geographical distance on advice-seeking success, the current study takes a mixed method approach and investigate R&D engineers in a French cluster related to the semi-conductor industry. By analyzing the lived experience of 17 R&D workers, as recounted in in-depth interviews, we draw a conceptual distinction between surface and deep advice-seeking (study 1). These types differ in terms of their temporality, form of reciprocity and expected contribution. Consistent with this dual conceptualization and previous literature on the geography of knowledge, we predict that distant ties in the context of deep advice-seeking are beneficial to the innovation performance of R&D workers, but detrimental in the context of surface advice-seeking. A test of these hypotheses, involving 113 R&D workers, provides support for the proposed model (study 2). All in all, the paper sheds new light on geography and location as essential factors of innovation.

Learning and diffusion of knowledge in clean energy communities

Clean energy communities (CEC) represent emerging socio-technical systems that offer a suitable alternative to non-sustainable energy production and consumption. Thus, CECs cultivate new knowledge of clean energy use and diffuse it among their members as well as interested publics outside the CECs. This paper aims to contribute to the rather limited literature on the role of learning and knowledge in energy transitions in general and CECs’ knowledge circulation and learning in particular. The paper presents findings about the knowledge development and learning settings within CECs that provide the ways of cultivating knowledge within CECs and ways of disseminating this knowledge outside the CECs for potentially influencing wider social change. This research contributes to the energy transition literature by focusing on the overlooked perspective of learning and knowledge dissemination as an important part of a niche-innovation setting.

Man at the centre of technology. A philosophical investigation of anthropological knowledge in man-machine-interfaces

The paper aims to examine the construction, circulation, and transformation of knowledge about man (anthropological knowledge) in human-technology interaction in the 20th century. The analysis focuses on the prerequisites of the industrial working world and its implicit knowledge about human beings. However, the basis and starting point of technical adaptation is usually ignored: The concepts of “man” and the anthropological knowledge gained experimentally from a anthropocentric designed interface. Based on the concept of an intuitive interface design this problem will be investigated. The questions posed by this article as well as the objectives associated with them open up an interdisciplinary framework between philosophy of technology, philosophical anthropology and history of science given that they not only focus – by means of historical reconstruction – on historical changes in technological developments. They also address the issue of generation and transformation of anthropological knowledge in the definitions and interactions of “man” and “technology”.

Infrastructural strains on scholarly transnational collaboration in eighteenth-century Europe. The logistics of knowledge in making Thomas Mangey’s Philonis Judaei Opera 1728–42

ABSTRACT This paper analyses the logistics of knowledge in eighteenth-century Anglo-Swedish scholarly collaborative relationships. More specifically, it analyses the making of Thomas Mangey’s Philonis Judaei Opera as a long-distance collaborative project between Mangey and the Swedish scholars Jacob Serenius and Erik Benzelius. The early modern Republic of Letters has commonly been characterised as a collaborative communication system upheld by communitarian norms. This description has however been challenged by several recent studies, which have underlined the commercial aspects of early modern scholarly exchange. Building on such studies, this article highlights how negotiations about the logistics of knowledge circulation – of, e.g. shipping and long-distance financing – were an integral part of early modern transnational scholarly relationships. In the correspondence between the three scholars of 1728–42, we find ample practical details of how they struggled with slow and unreliable regional mercantile infrastructures. The strains of these logistical challenges thoroughly shaped the relationships between the three scholars, and would eventually lead to the collapse of their collaboration.

The transnational historiography of a dynastic transition: Writing the Ming-Qing transition in seventeenth-century China, Korea, and Japan

AbstractThe Ming-Qing transition (1618–1683), a dynastic upheaval that not only consumed much of China, but also saw the Qing invasion of Joseon Korea and an influx of refugees into Tokugawa Japan, was a source of inspiration for writers across East Asia. Unofficial, contemporary histories written by Ming and early Qing subjects made their way by land and sea to Korea and Japan, where they were either adapted for domestic audiences or used as the basis for new unofficial histories of the dynastic transition.This article makes the argument that unofficial, contemporary history-writing about the Ming-Qing transition in China, Korea, and Japan was part of a regional trend towards an intellectual culture of contemporaneity. While scholars have focused on the transition and its impact upon notions of cultural centrality, it should be emphasized that these notions emerged alongside developments encouraging the production and circulation of contemporary, cross-cultural knowledge and information. In other words, the flourishing of print, diversification of reading audiences, and evolution of new modes of knowledge-production and transmission formed a background against which demand increased for updated information about a shared world. Participation as producers (writers and editors) and consumers (readers) in this seventeenth-century culture of contemporaneity was restricted by language, schooling, and economic standing. Nonetheless, a transnational history perspective will show that the unofficial, multi-vocal, and multilingual historiography of the Ming-Qing transition encourages a re-evaluation of not only the intellectual history of East Asia, but also the history of the transition.

A Chinese ‘modern’ device transforming the traditional healers’ practices in Cameroon

In the field of health, China's contribution is generally addressed either through its cooperation programmes or by the opening of private clinics by Chinese ‘doctors’. In Yaoundé and Douala, some private practices have been opened and various works have highlighted their role in the dissemination of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in Cameroon. Yet the craze for these structures did not last long. Today, while signs of their existence are still visible, many of these firms are closed. China's influence in the health field is, however, far from negligible, but it is taking place in unexpected areas. The circulation of goods and knowledge from China leaves more room for local reappropriation. Indeed, some Cameroonian traditional healers include knowledge from China in their daily practice through the use of ‘machines’ coming from China to ‘purify the body’, to ‘eliminate fat’, to regulate the tension, to ‘stimulate acupuncture points’ or ‘make diagnosis’ (using the quantum analyser or a ‘diagnostic machine’). From direct observations conducted between 2014 and 2021, this article presents the issues at stake for the practice of traditional healers by the modernization of the field through specific therapeutic devices and the quantum analyser coming from China into the health Cameroonian landscape. The paper demonstrates that the performance of the diagnostic machine has less to do with the concrete efficiency of the diagnosis of pathologies than with the dynamics of visibility vis-à-vis patients. The quantum analyser is, therefore, an interesting element revealing the constant process of renewal of medical pluralism in Cameroon, in which China is playing a central role today.