Collaborative Knowledge Production Research Articles

Multiple Authorship: The Collaborative Production of Knowledge in the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965–2020)

This paper challenges the notion of the heroic genius as driver of invention and development in architectural culture. It considers the production of architectural ideas prior to design as an integral part of the production of architectural projects and takes the Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition (1965–2020), a yearly housing ideas competition from Japan, as a tangible case study for exploring notions of multiple authorship. The paper focuses on the editions of the competition judged by Toyo Ito, Rem Koolhaas, and Kazuyo Sejima–who respectively set the provocative themes of “Comfort in the Metropolis” (1988), “House with No Style” (1992), and “The Possibilities of Non- Movement” (1996)–to illustrate how this ideas competition functions as a fruitful dialogue between judge and contestants that produces architectural knowledge collaboratively. At the same time, by de-mystifying the genius of the single “star architect” judge, this paper aims to contribute to the ongoing quest to write a more inclusive global history of architecture that reveals voices hitherto silenced.

Promoting Collaborative Pedagogy in Classrooms: Challenges and Solutions

<p><em>Collaborative pedagogy appears to be productive among students and thereby adopted in many classrooms to ensure that students are active participants in the knowledge production process. However, challenges exist among students, alongside their instructors, which hinders the active involvement of students in the collaborative knowledge production process. In the same vein, the study also examines the possible ways to navigate the challenges. The argument is located within social constructivism and conceptual analysis of collaborative pedagogy to explore the trajectories of collaborative classrooms in schools. In response to the challenges, the study proposed solutions that include promotion of unity in diversities among students, the introduction of cultural variations in classrooms, and instigation of student’s readiness to interact. The study concludes that collaborative knowledge construction is worthy of being promoted with the recommendation that schools should ensure that students are taught to be united in the process of generating knowledge and that there must be concerted efforts to teach different cultures in the system with student motivation for natural interest. </em></p>

Storying climate knowledge: Notes on experimental political ecology

Political ecology emphasizes critique, and, through critique, its ability to better understand nature-society relations. Recently, calls have been made from within the sub-discipline to move beyond critique, and towards engaging nature-society relations more experimentally. This paper asks: is it possible for political ecology to be less reactive and more proactive? Rather than studying events that have already happened, is it possible to study events currently happening or that have not yet happened? This paper is an attempt to do political ecology more experimentally by staging an intervention and studying its outcomes. Given the abstract nature of climate change, and given storytelling’s capacity for helping people make sense of the world around them, this project combined political ecology analysis and storytelling, resulting in an experimental process of collaborative climate knowledge production in regions, and with people, central to the changing climate. Research for this paper took place over fourteen months in Appalachia and Alaska, climate-vulnerable regions with economies tied to fossil fuel industries and with culturally rich storytelling traditions. The aim of this paper is threefold. First, I will examine political ecology scholarship that already engages with experimentation as a way of making the case for a more experimental political ecology. Second, I will discuss the process and outcomes from my experimental research, namely that storytelling is a meaningful way of building climate knowledge. Finally, by outlining the challenges of doing this research, this paper ends with lessons for future iterations of more experimental research.

Addressing social inequity through improving relational care: A social-ecological model based on the experiences of migrant women and midwives in South Wales.

Migrant and ethnic inequalities in maternal and perinatal mortality persist across high-income countries. Addressing social adversity and inequities across the childbirth trajectory cannot be left to chance and the good intentions of practitioners. Robust, evidence-based tools designed to address inequity by enhancing both the quality of provision and the experience of care are needed. An inductive modelling approach was used to develop a new evidence-based conceptual model of woman-midwife relationships, drawing on data from an ethnographic study of relationships between migrant Pakistani women and midwives, conducted between 2013 and 2016 in South Wales, UK. Key analytic themes from early data were translated into social-ecological concepts, and a model was developed to represent how these key themes interacted to influence the woman-midwife relationship. Three key concepts influencing the woman-midwife relationship were developed from the three major themes of the underpinning research: (1) Healthcare System; (2) Culture and Religion; and (3) Family Relationships. Two additional weaving concepts appeared to act as a link between these three key concepts: (1) Authoritative Knowledge and (2) Communication of Information. Social and political factors were also considered as contextual factors within the model. A visual representation of this model was developed and presented. The model presented in this paper, along with future work to further test and refine it in other contexts, has the potential to impact on inequalities by facilitating future discussion on cultural issues, encouraging collaborative learning and knowledge production and providing a framework for future global midwifery practice, education and research. At the outset of the underpinning research, a project involvement group was created to contribute to study design and conduct. This group consisted of the three authors, an Advocacy Officer at Race Equality First and an NHS Consultant Midwife. This group met regularly throughout the research process, and members were involved in discussions regarding ethical/cultural/social issues, recruitment methods, the creation of participant information materials, interpretation of data and the dissemination strategy. Ideas for the underpinning research were also discussed with members of the Pakistani community during community events and at meetings with staff from minority ethnic and migrant support charities (BAWSO, Race Equality First, The Mentor Ring). Local midwives contributed to study design through conversations during informal observations of antenatal appointments for asylum seekers and refugees.

Collaborative design prototyping in transdisciplinary research: An approach to heterogeneity and unknowns

This paper provides insights into the practice of design-based interventions in transdisciplinary research and demonstrates how design prototyping can be made fruitful in processes of transformation and collaborative knowledge production. It shows how heterogeneous perspectives and stocks of knowledge can be related to each other and moments of integration generated by working with conceptual designs. Due to their open character, design methods are discussed as particularly promising when dealing with a high degree of complexity, uncertainties, and unknowns. After a characterization of design research and prototyping, common strategies of design research and transdisciplinary research for addressing heterogeneity and unknowns will be explored. This serves to frame the transfer of design practices to support integration processes in transdisciplinary teams. Using an example from a transdisciplinary case study in Transylvania, the implementation of design prototyping will be demonstrated and initial findings presented. Different integration dimensions from transdisciplinary sustainability research serve as a basis for investigating the epistemic, social-organizational, and communicative integration performance of design prototyping. For transdisciplinary research, design practices expand the methodical canon for working in heterogeneous teams and tackling uncertainty and unknowns in openness.

Cooperation without Consensus: Brokering Resiliency with Boundary Objects

AbstractThis paper presents a case study of how boundary objects were deployed to support a collaborative knowledge production process that resulted in the creation of climate change knowledge usable to municipal governments in the New Jersey shore region. In doing so, a case is made that boundary objects are useful throughout the collaborative process in overcoming ambiguity and disagreement. This points to boundary objects possessing a wider array of capabilities than is frequently theorized in the climate policy literature. Effectively designing and using boundary objects, however, requires carefully considering how they interface and interact with one another.

Environmental education, social justice and teacher education: Enabling meaningful environmental learning in local contexts

Short (2010, 7) indicates that continued global population growth, technological advancement and subsequent burdens on the natural world from consumer demands during the 20th century has led to many environmental issues and concerns. According to (Edwards 2011) the resultant or consequent problems in the environment could reach levels that could push the planet to levels of ecological disaster. Evidence of ecosystem destruction, human induced climate change, social injustice and increasing economic strife is mounting in many parts of the world. Environmental Education (EE) has often been mentioned as an important response to the issues mentioned above, but if EE is to contribute to the transformation to sustainable living, teachers have a vital role to play. Thus, teacher education programmes need to prepare preservice adequately for these challenges arising in the 21st century. This exploratory theoretical article reviews approaches and ideas for the development of curriculum for environment related education in teacher education programmes. I draw on the work of Short (2002) related to place based collaborative knowledge production and Jickling and Wals (2008), active and co-operative learning in context, to inform curriculum development possibilities for EE. The research highlights the importance of active participation for meaningful environmental learning and presents arguments for including local environmental issues and knowledge development during the practicum as key activities to enable meaningful environmental learning and social justice in teacher education programmes.

A cross-cultural analysis of the modes and effectiveness of collaborative production of knowledge on Quora

PurposeThe purpose of the paper is to investigate how cross-cultural elements such as cultural difference and stereotype are integrated into collaborative modes and actions and to explore their corresponding effectiveness.Design/methodology/approachThe sample of the quantitative content analysis is drawn from the posts with the topic of China on Quora. A collaborative case, where two users have a question-and-answer interaction, is taken as the unit of analysis. The effectiveness of collaboration is operationalized as the extent to which a collaboratively produced answer is visited and favorably reviewed, using the feedback index (the number of upvotes*1,000/views). One of the sampled collaborative cases is further analyzed qualitatively to see how cultural differences, stereotypes and other factors are incorporated into users' interaction.FindingsThis content analysis reveals nine modes of collaborative production of knowledge on Quora: initial questioning, pointed answering, raising doubts, responding to others, agreeing with others, correcting mistakes, enriching content, further questioning and extending issues. Diversity of the cross-cultural acts of collaborative production, particularly two of often-used collaborative actions, correcting stereotypes and supplementing cultural differences, helps to enhance overall collaborative effectiveness.Practical implicationsThis paper offers new perspectives and ideas for strategies to change socially problematic stereotypes, e.g. to correct stereotypes where necessary and use more convincing resources such as reliable images as collaborative actions to bridge cultural differences. It also calls on social Q&A website developers to create more international users-friendly design by providing various channels for users with diverse cultural backgrounds to interact with each other.Originality/valueThis study is one of the first to investigate online collaborative knowledge production within a broader cross-cultural context. Specifically, cultural factors and cross-cultural collaborative actions have been innovatively integrated into this research, enriching the dimensions that can be used for collaboration classification. It is helpful for users from different countries to actively adopting different strategies to overcome cultural differences, preconceptions and other negative factors that are not conducive to communication and knowledge acquisition.

Feminist collaborative becomings: an entangled process of knowing through fitness objects

ABSTRACT This paper details a collaborative journey in which we sought to use new materialist theoretical and post-qualitative approaches to explore the entangled phenomena of women’s moving bodies and fitness objects. In particular, we engaged with Karen Barad’s agential realism to explore the materiality of the sports bra and its material-discursive relationality with women’s bodies, fleshy exertions, and physical forces. In this paper, we outline our improvised process of using new materialist theory to guide our research journey as we moved and lived with lululemon’s Enlite sports bra. We describe the fluid, unscripted nature of this entangled collaborative research process, including visiting a lululemon store together, a seven-month digital dialogue about our experiences of moving with Enlite, and different techniques (i.e., cutting together-apart, moving methods, and creative writing) used to challenge the boundaries of our collaborative knowledge production process. In so doing, we contribute to two key bodies of literature, i) scholarship exploring the onto-epistemological challenges of new materialisms, and ii) a growing body of work by feminist scholars drawing upon new materialisms to examine sporting objects and the fine details of women’s moving bodies. Although some may consider the sports bra to be a trivial object, this paper reveals a feminist politics in rethinking the research process and carefully examining the entangled relations that unfold between women’s moving bodies and everyday fitness objects.

Evaluating socially engaged climate research: Scientists’ visions of a climate resilient U.S. Southwest

Abstract Socially engaged science and collaborative research practices offer promising ways to address complex environmental and societal problems like climate variability and climate change. However, it is unclear if and how these types of collaborative knowledge production result in tangible impacts. Drawing from a 6-year evaluation, this article investigates the outcomes and contributions of ten collaborative research projects supported by a federally funded climate research program in the US Southwest. Based on a series of narratives that outline researchers’ objectives, anticipated outcomes are compared to those that emerged over a 6-year period. Results indicate several contributions that the program has made toward raising awareness about climate issues in the US Southwest, increasing capacity to adapt to climate change and climate variability, and building lasting individual and institutional collaborative relationships. However, researchers sometimes envision direct applications of their work, such as informing policy, planning, and decision-making, to be different than what occurred within the 6-year timeframe. Further exploration of these results reveals implicit assumptions in understanding how scientific information translates into use. This article offers insight into how researchers envision their impact, the management and development of a mission-oriented research program, and the use of evaluation to understand how collaborative research contributes to societal and environmental change.

Messy realities and collaborative knowledge production in tourism

In this paper, we draw on a relational ontology to explore what collaborative ways of knowing might mean in the field of tourism research. Using tourism as a prism to explore the messy realities of collaborative knowledge production, we argue that knowledge is always co-created through situated practices. By focusing on collaboration and co-creation of research and based on a discussion on what, how and where to know we suggest four orientations of research practices that clarify what collaborative research can be about and how it is of value. Research collaboration should capture the situated practices, strive for critical proximity, be interventionist and seek to come to matter in new ways.

Collisional O2 + N2 State-Selected Cross Sections for Open Science Cloud Reuse.

In this paper, we report a quasi-classical trajectory study of the internal energy state specificity of dissociative O2 + N2 collision rates computed at high temperatures on an accurate potential energy surface (PES). This paper analyzes the outcomes of the trajectory calculations performed by explicitly considering the rotational state of the reactants and compares them with those of a previous study carried out by assuming a thermal rotational distribution. In particular, in order to quantify the deviation of the rotationally thermalized rates from the rotationally state-selected ones, we discuss here the properties of the corresponding state-specific and state-to-state cross sections with the support of both internuclear distance and bond-order reduced dimensionality representations of the isoenergetic contours of the PES. This allows us to single out a suitable bond-order-like process coordinate useful for modeling detailed dissociation cross sections and rate coefficients and relating them, as well, to some specific features of the PES. Furthermore, this is also shown to be useful for structuring data repositories of the molecular section of the European Open Science Cloud Project so as to obtain collaborative production, validation, reuse, and dissemination of chemical processes' knowledge and efficiency parameters.

"Lissa": An EthnoGraphic Experiment

The paper analyzes a recent experiment in the collaborative production of ethnographic knowledge and the use of the graphic novel form as an alternative to the conventional academic monograph. <em>Lissa: A Story about Medical Promise, Friendship, and Revolution</em> (2017) is discussed here as a useful tool in the age of globalization for building recognition of the need to protect the lives of people other than our immediate kin, tribe, race, or nation. The paper argues that both the collaborative research behind the story and the formal experimentation stem from the authors’ sense of accountability to their informants. By telling a story about distant others who are given names and faces, <em>Lissa</em>’s authors encourage readers to develop empathy across borders.

From Enrolment Rates to Collaborative Knowledge Production: A Critique to the Internationalization of Higher Education in Canada

Although not a new phenomenon, the evolvement, range and characteristics of the modern process of internationalization are worthy of attention. Despite many potential benefits of having a multicultural campus, internationalizing higher education requires more than the physical presence of international students. As stated on the literature, this process must value transnational knowledge as an asset to the educational experience, thus promoting collaborative knowledge production between teachers and students. Nonetheless, there is a paucity of studies done from the point of view of educators depicting how they perceive their graduate international students and internationalization itself. Therefore, through the perspectives of 10 professors at a mid-sized western Canadian university, this critical phenomenological research offers an analysis of the present condition of higher education in Canada. More specifically, this paper deconstructs some of the challenges of internationalization, in which graduates are to be recognized as active agents of circulation and production of knowledge and not just mere figures or passive recipients of information. Finally, questions about the complexity of incorporating epistemic diversity in a meaningful way through internationalization are proposed.

Co-Creation as an agonistic practice in the favela of Santa Marta, Rio de Janeiro

This article explores the potential of ‘Co-Creation’ to develop new understandings of neighbourhood disadvantage in collaboration with civil society partners. It argues that there is a growing need for collaborative knowledge production with communities carrying vernacular knowledges previously invalidated by dominant epistemologies. The first part of the article undertakes a reconceptualisation of ‘co-creation’, a term usually associated with citizen involvement in neoliberal contexts, redeveloping it as a ‘critical artistic practice’ (Mouffe, 2013) in which new ways of imagining the city can be articulated. The second part of the article examines the practice of Co-Creation as a participatory methodology involving artists, researchers and stakeholders in developing ‘agonistic spaces’ by scrutinising a five-day workshop conducted in the Rio de Janeiro favela of Santa Marta to explore multiple understandings and meanings of this neighbourhood. Through an analysis of creative workshop activities such as photovoice and mapping exercises, the authors explore the potential of the Co-Creation approach to construct new subjectivities that can help subvert existing configurations of power. The conclusion formulates some recommendations about future strategies to maximise Co-Creation’s potential to engage communities in collaborative knowledge production about their neighbourhoods and bring about positive change.

Understanding the traditional customary law of the Yi people via ethnographic film \u2013 collaborative ethnographic film making process

This paper will take the film The Rules from Ancestors as the basis to discuss the “writing” process of ethnographic film, addressing how a contemporary visual ethnography can be realized through the presentation of a film on ethnic culture.The Rules from Ancestors is an anthropological film about the Traditional Customary Law of the Yi people in China, produced by the author of this paper in 2006. As an integrated anthropological film, its theoretical basis is the “holism” and “legal pluralism” of legal anthropology, and its stories are narrated through objective observation and interactive collaboration. The author attempted to construct an “intermediary context” within the film’s narrative structure. The aim was to establish an experimental visual ethnographic expression that progresses from “complicity” to “sharing”, to replace the traditional ethnographic mode of expression, localized fieldwork. In so doing, I hoped to explore the possibilities of collaborative knowledge production between the photographer, the subject, and the audience, as well as a non-unidirectional methodology for the flow and transfer of knowledge.Through the exploration described above, this paper attempts to respond to the ongoing debate on the relationship between visual anthropology and written anthropology. Is anthropological film a “self-contained system reaching the same goal with different methods”, or simply an “auxiliary tool” of written anthropology? Based on an ethnographic introspection on anthropological filmmaking practices, this paper will provide explicit support to the former standpoint, as well as a discussion on methodology.

Division of labor in collaborative knowledge production: The role of team size and interdisciplinarity

ABSTRACT Teams performing scientific research are becoming increasingly large and interdisciplinary. While prior work has examined antecedents and performance implications of these trends, it is not clear how size and interdisciplinarity relate to teams’ internal organization, especially the division of labor (DoL) between members. We first develop an organizing framework that integrates three complementary dimensions of DoL: (1) the specialization of individual team members, (2) the distribution of activities across team members, and (3) interdependencies between activities. We then discuss how these aspects of DoL are related to team size and interdisciplinarity and test our hypotheses using author contribution data from over 12,000 scientific articles. We find that team size has a positive relationship with an aggregate measure of DoL, but disaggregated measures show that this relationship holds for some aspects of DoL and not others. We also find that interdisciplinary teams use greater division of labor, although this effect depends on the degree to which interdisciplinarity is intra- versus inter-personal. We conclude by discussing how our conceptual and empirical toolkit may be applied in future research on the drivers and consequences of division of labor in teams.

In defence of representation

ABSTRACT The ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences is premised on the critique of representation. In this essay, I defend representation against some of the major criticisms advanced in archaeology. In developing my argument, I draw insights from the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce and its incorporation in semiotic anthropology. I conclude that while it is not possible to go beyond representation, we can nonetheless improve our representational models through a ‘hermeneutics of generosity.’ Such a perspective involves opening up our interpretive practices to the agency of non-human actors not usually considered in our archaeological accounts. But it also involves engaging with descendent communities in the practice of collaborative knowledge production. These moves have the dual benefit of increasing scientific accuracy and underwriting meaningful social action.

Gender, power and emotions in the collaborative production of knowledge: A large-scale analysis of Wikipedia editor conversations

This paper studies the conversations behind the operations of a large-scale, online knowledge production community: Wikipedia. We investigate gender differences in the conversational styles (emotionality) and conversational domain choices (controversiality and gender stereotypicality of content) among contributors, and how these differences change as we look up the organizational hierarchy. In the general population of contributors, we expect and find significant gender differences, whereby comments and statements from women are higher-valenced, have more affective content, and are in domains that are less controversial and more female-typed. Importantly, these differences diminish or disappear among people in positions of power: female authorities converge to the behavior of their male counterparts, such that the gender gaps in valence and willingness to converse on controversial content disappear. We find greater sorting into topics according to their gender stereotypicality. We discuss mechanisms and implications for research on gender differences, leadership behavior, and conversational phenomena arising from such large-scale forms of knowledge production.

Caring in the age of COVID-19: lessons from science and society.

This paper focuses on our research and intervention in health promotion with patients and communities affected by various infectious diseases, in the project Knowledge-Sharing Platform. This project is developed at the National Institute of Infectious Diseases Evandro Chagas in the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and promotes the continuing involvement of health researchers and professionals in the collaborative production of knowledge on health with patients and community groups and in their training as community health promoters. The new epidemic scenario created the demand for a space of dialogue and knowledge-sharing on the prevention of COVID-19 transmission. Due to the interruption of regular activities in the Knowledge-Sharing Platform, a strategy was launched to serve as a link between science and society and help overcome the social isolation imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The WhatsApp group allowed project members to participate by addressing questions (audio) on COVID-19 through mediation by community group leaders. The main questions by participants related to risk factors, transmission, immunity to the novel coronavirus, care related to prevention, symptoms, and treatment; and COVID-19 and influenza vaccine. The educational material Caring in the Age of COVID-19 was produced and shared with community leaders and distributed to the respective groups and was eventually shared in their communities as a response to a demand for knowledge that responds to the concerns of people already exposed to structural vulnerability.