Collective Knowledge Production Research Articles

Feeling–living–fighting the housing crisis: testimonio as methodology in geographic housing research

ABSTRACT While advocates and urbanites regard the housing crisis as a major challenge, federal and city officials seldom act with the urgency demanded of them by their constituency, of which a growing number is either unhoused or housing insecure. The aim of this paper is to study this crisis from the perspective of those most affected and contribute to a debate mostly dominated by economic and policy-oriented approaches. My use of testimonios collected in Washington, DC, between 2019 and 2022 reworks how knowledge on the housing crisis is constituted and highlights both the relational and collective knowledge production by those most affected by changes in the real estate economy. The goal of this paper is to stress the political potential and agency of people who tell their stories as they fight to (re)claim lost and threatened places and battle to protect their homes and neighbourhoods. On a broader scope, this paper sees value in everyday experiential knowledge and questions whose narratives of place are valued, in an effort to bring forth a new methodology in geographic housing research.

Graphic Histories of Solidarity, in Solidarity

Revolutionary experiments require building revolutionary relationships. This praxis of material and social creativity to reorganise power dynamics and weave connections across weaponised divides, are evident in the content, the form and the backstory woven into Janet Biehl's Their Blood Got Mixed: Revolutionary Rojava and the War on ISIS. Written and illustrated by Janet Biehl, it is a graphic memoir that can be read as both an historical narrative and a blueprint of a contemporary revolutionary experiment that combines political theory and graphic art to tell the story of how ISIS has been driven back in Northern Syria by people fighting for a society based on principles of direct democracy, political secularism, gender equality, and ecological sustainability. Whereas in the past, after the liberation of Rojava in 2012, Biehl spent time interviewing leadership, this book relays her interviews with women across the region and across the various projects of reorganising and defending social, political, cultural and economic life in 2019 after four years of warfare against ISIS and the Turkish state. Reflecting on the relationships that make revolutionary history, and that produce artistic histories of revolutionary experiments, this review article considers the history in this book and of this book, in conversation with recently published graphic non-fiction, and draws on engaged scholarship concerned with the politics of collective knowledge production in and for movements of solidarity urgently needed in the face of the imploding crisis of colonial borders.

Revisiting testimonio as critical race feminista methodology in educational research

This study is a review of educational scholarship that has utilized testimonio as a methodological approach. We begin with a brief overview of testimonio, highlighting its discursive subversions that align with longstanding traditions of storytelling within Communities of Color, and in critical race storytelling. We then describe how testimonio is an important tool within a broader Critical Race Feminista Methodology—a space of theorizing humanizing, anti-colonial methodological approaches that disrupt structural oppression and are guided by “a nostalgia for wholeness” (Delgado Bernal, Pérez Huber, & Malagon, 2019). Testimonio as a Critical Race Feminista Methodology allows for an interweaving of Chicana feminist and critical race epistemological and theoretical tools with qualitative research methods to cultivate methodological space for convivencia, critical reflection, collective knowledge production, and healing. Through this literature review, we see how this methodology brings mutual validation, shared humanity, and imperatives of social justice to the fore, shifting our research praxis from one that reproduces the colonial project, to one that seeks to transform and lead to collective well-being.

Fundamentos do processo de trabalho em terapia ocupacional: uma abordagem analítica a partir do diálogo entre Terapia Ocupacional Social e Saúde Coletiva Latino-Americana

Abstract Introduction This paper presents an analytical approach to occupational therapy practice grounded in historical dialectical materialism. It understands occupational therapy professional practice as work within a capitalist system, and thus subject to analysis through the labor process theory. Objective To propose an analytical approach to occupational therapy practice aimed at supporting the development of an emancipatory practice framework based on the dialogue between Social Occupational Therapy and Latin American Collective Health. Method Utilizing emancipatory action research methodologies, this study conducted 10 workshops with 10 occupational therapists aimed at collective knowledge production. Results Human activity is identified as the object of occupational therapy working process, defined by the category work in its ontological dimension. Radical participation is set as the intended product of this process, which entails engaging in efforts to transform the social determination of collective living conditions. The individuals in this process include occupational therapists and the followed-up individuals, groups, and/or communities, all viewed as social beings collaborating toward social transformation. Four theoretical-methodological tools are identified: emancipatory analysis of human activities, emancipatory proposition of human activities, operationalization of radical participation, and interventions in the social fabric. Conclusion Occupational therapy, as a form of social practice, offers a specific contribution to the development of a collective revolutionary praxis. This praxis, aimed at realizing a concrete utopia, seeks to generate the means to create a new society.

‘VISIONEN VOM IDEALEN GESCHICHTE‐SCHREIBEN UND GESCHICHTE‐MACHENʼ: EPISTEMIC (IN)JUSTICE AND INSURRECTION IN SHARON DODUA OTOO'S HISTORICAL AND MEMORY ACTIVISM

ABSTRACTThis article explores Sharon Dodua Otoo's historical and memory activism and demonstrates how she challenges epistemic injustices inflicted by dominant models of cultural memory and identity in Germany, particularly in relation to its colonial history. Such epistemic injustice takes two main forms – the ongoing subjugation of subaltern (hi)stories and the under‐acknowledgement of grassroots diasporic activism – resulting in multiple levels of marginalisation and sustaining what the philosopher Charles Mills calls ‘the white epistemology of ignorance’. Building on Sarah Colvin's studies of epistemic resistance in Otoo's literary prose, I argue that Otoo's historical and memory activism is an example of what José Medina refers to as ‘epistemic insurrection’. Otoo's self‐consciously collaborative interventions in historical and memory politics facilitate the kind of ‘beneficial epistemic friction’ expounded by Medina, which is necessary to prevent dominant forces from co‐opting insurgent counter‐histories and counter‐memories. Otoo invokes a community of activist experts and poets, past and present, whose collective knowledge production offers alternative ways of thinking about history and opportunities to subvert the power dynamics of cultural memory. Her activism reaches across diverse genres, media and public domains, and engages multiperspectivity to contribute to more pluralistic modes of doing history and memory.

Education Prototyping: a Methodological Device for Technical Democracy

AbstractThe potential of applying a ‘technical democracy’ (Callon et al. 2009) to the context of sociotechnical controversies in education is the focus of this paper. This process reflects an emergent 'thought collective' (Fleck 1979) whose common interests, yet diverse expertise, are articulated through provisional objects and infrastructure for collective and experimental knowledge production. The technique of ‘prototyping’ was then deployed for a design experiment to: first, slow down, or suspend, existing power relations of co-evolving technologies and methodologies and, second, to accelerate, or expand, new possibilities and configurations for democratisation. Education prototyping is then introduced, with the intent to co-produce pluralistic spaces that expose challenges and test possibilities. Key aspects include the following: (i) prototyping dynamics: problematization and prefiguration; and, (ii) prototyping practices: spanning the temporal, methodological, relational, material, and spatial. These aspects were tested in the context of a research project exploring automated essay scoring in Australian schools. While always situated and partial, we argue that prototyping offers a unique device to interrupt and experiment with the politics of collaboratively researching increasingly networked and commercialised technologies across education and society.

Autonomy and Knowledge Processes - a Systematic Literary Review

Knowledge processes, such as knowledge creation, sharing and application, enable knowledge production that increases innovation and superior organizational performance. Knowledge processes are ultimately and fundamentally conducted – or not engaged in – by the individuals. Hence, knowledge production is disrupted if individuals are prevented from using their knowledge production potential. One potential factor that causes disruption in knowledge production is the lack of autonomy. As autonomy means self-governance and independency, it enables independent and unique knowledge processing by the individual, and thereby supports both individual and collective level knowledge production. Despite the importance of the role of autonomy in knowledge production, there is no research-based knowledge of which knowledge process have been studied from the perspective of autonomy, and what has been left unexplored. This research clarifies the research literature by finding out which knowledge processes have been studied from the point of view of autonomy. Also, what has been found concerning the relationship between autonomy and knowledge processes is considered. The research was conducted as a systematic literature review supplemented by qualitative content analysis in which the articles up the year 2022 from databases Scopus and Web of Science were reviewed. The most notable finding of this study is the lack of research between autonomy and knowledge identification and the paucity of research between autonomy and knowledge internalization. This is a significant finding since knowledge identification affect what knowledge is processed and produced in the organization. Internalizations in turn affects knowledge-based orientation and knowledge production in the organizational environment. This paper contributes to the organizational research literature by summing up the existing research on the interface of autonomy and knowledge processes and provides a refined understanding on the central role of autonomy in the effective implementation of knowledge processes, as well as avenues for future research.

What is your intention? Tacit knowledge and community-based learning for collision avoidance in the global maritime industry

ABSTRACT This paper examines the practice of collision avoidance in Merchant ships to highlight the role of tacit knowledge and collective learning in the formation of professional practice. Analysis of 1,431 recorded VHF radio conversations drawn from real-time ship-to-ship interactions provides a unique window onto professional competence in navigation, and the application of professional judgement underpinned by tacit knowledge learned through practice. Moreover, we argue that such tacit knowledge is gained within a ‘community of practice’. More specifically, our data reveal how: (i) the practice of collision avoidance is more collaborative than reference to the extant regulations (the COLREGs) alone would suggest, and (ii) the practice of discussing collision avoidance over the radio can be seen as a form of collective production and learning of tacit knowledge through practice. Consequently, our analysis provides insight into the social nature of collision avoidance practice. In so doing, the paper makes a significant contribution by (i) adding a new example to the corpus of research in this area, (ii) introducing the community perspective of learning to the maritime sector, (iii) extending the concept of community-based learning by presenting data that illustrates both individual and collective learning.

Endometriosis pain and epistemic community: Mapping discourses in online discussions among sufferers

We focused in this study on how the private experience of pain is made public through online discourse by sufferers of endometriosis.Empirically, we analyse two highly active endometriosis communities on the online social platform Reddit. Drawing on a mixed-methods design, we leverage large-scale social data, and a combination of computational and interpretive approaches for text analysis to study the role and shape of interactions relating to ‘pain’ for the formation of epistemic community online around endometriosis. The dataset, consisting of 70,817 forum posts and comments, was collected in May of 2021.Our study shows how pain becomes meaningful for endometriosis sufferers in relation to a multidimensional discursive space of words and concepts that are used to express it. Pain was frequently disguised, underplayed or hidden altogether, from fears of misunderstanding, medical dismissal, and embarrassment.Clearly, peer validation can be found in the relative anonymity of Reddit discussions. While the experience of pain is individual and subjective, when communities share similar experiences this reinforces patient ownership of the pain, which in turn supports the epistemic authority of the patient collective.A detailed understanding of how and why pain is discussed in online spaces has much to contribute more broadly to discussions of experiential collective knowledge production among individuals with endometriosis and other chronic illnesses.

Canons and Colonies: a Global Trajectory of Sociology

The history of sociology as a field of knowledge, especially in the English-speaking world, has been obscured by the discipline’s own origin myth in the form of a canon of “classical theory” concerned with European modernity. Sociology was involved in the world of empire from the start. Making the canon more inclusive, in gender, race, and even global terms, is not an adequate correction. Important types of social knowledge, including movement-based and indigenous knowledges, resist canonization. The turn towards decolonial and Southern perspectives, now happening across the social sciences, opens up new perspectives on the history of knowledge. These can be linked with a more sophisticated view of the collective production of knowledge by the workforces that are increasingly, though unequally, interacting. Potentials for a more effectively engaged sociology emerge.

Militant Design Research: A Proposal to Politicize Design Knowledge-making

This work reflects on how design can engage in emancipatory processes of knowledge-making through Militant Design Research. The argument draws on the work of scholars who are engaged in counter-hegemonic design research and practice, and questions the knowledge production structures within academia. ‘Militant research’ is presented as a Latin American theoretical-political approach to knowledge production in social sciences, engaging processes of research, educational, and political actions, and uniting organic intellectuals, researchers, and social movements. Inspired by this perspective, principles for Militant Design Research are outlined to stimulate alliances between designers and social movements for the collective production of knowledge, to overcome situations of oppression in and out of academia.

Fab Labs to Fab Cities: Exploring Innovative Urban Spaces in İzmir

This study focuses on fabrication laboratories (fab labs) that provide user-oriented innovative urban spaces to meet advanced technologies and city dwellers who can share their knowledge in solving local problems. The aim is to explore the potential of fab labs as a part of smart city initiatives to develop the fab city by creating a network for collective knowledge and technology-enabled production in collaboration with local communities, companies, NGOs, and institutions. The opted methodology is to examine several fab labs as innovative and creative spaces in İzmir to evaluate their potential role in the development of the fab city. Fab labs might improve the organizational gap between local governments and inhabitants in developing innovative and sustainable solutions. This paper fulfills the lack of systematic research on fab labs; how they relate to smart city initiatives, evolving into fab cities, and obtaining and implementing the know-how of fab cities’ global knowledge.

We should redefine scientific expertise: an extended virtue account

An expert is commonly considered to be somebody who possesses the right kind of knowledge and skills to find out true answers for questions in a domain. However, this common conception that focuses only on an individual’s knowledge and skills is not very useful to understand the epistemically interdependent nature of contemporary scientific expertise, which becomes increasingly more relevant due to the rise of large interdisciplinary research collaborations. The typical scientific expert today relies substantially on complex scientific instruments and numerous other experts in forming expert judgment. Moreover, we have research collaborations where multiple scientists interact in a way that gives rise to distributed cognitive systems, which can act as a single informant. Accordingly, our concept of scientific expertise should not consist only in individual knowledge and skills, but also accommodate epistemic dependence and collective knowledge production. To this aim, this paper proposes a reconstruction of the concept of scientific expertise as informant reliability by building on the virtue-epistemological account of epistemic competences and theories of extended and distributed cognition. Considered in reference to the social epistemic function of expertise, a scientific expert should be conceived as a reliable informant in a scientific domain, which implies that when consulted on matters in that domain they assert competently, honestly, and completely. Competent expert assertion involves the epistemic responsibility to draw on nothing but the highest degree of epistemic competence relevant to the given context. Thus, being a reliable informant may require one to draw on an extended epistemic competence that goes beyond one’s individual competence, or to form supra-individual or group-informants that manifest collectively the kind of complex epistemic competence required for the investigation of certain research questions.

Artistic research as the collective production of knowledge

In the first part, Jonas Kellermeyer presents his concept of artistic research. He takes this to mean the collective production of knowledge in which members of civil society participate just as much as science and the art world. In the second part, this approach is adopted to examine a project about Ubiquitous Computing and thereby exemplarily explained.

Biopolitics of "Acquired Immunity": The War Discourse and Feminist Response-Abilities in Art, Science, and Technology During COVID-19.

If we are to adequately decipher and make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the ways in which large populations as well as their immune systems have responded to the virus, we ought to map the broader sociomaterial contexts in which a planetary health crisis, such as COVID-19, has been situated. Adopting a biophilosophical approach and feminist versions of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article problematizes the virality of the war discourse and its tactical uses for the sake of biopower during COVID-19. Also, a queering lens is used to question the military metaphors deployed during COVID-19. Queering is understood in this article as to make change, and to act in a way that is disruptive of allegedly oppressive power structures. Queering seeks to expose or otherwise uncover that norms are, in fact, just limitations on a far broader set of possibilities. With the aim of exploring how critical associations can extend their response-abilities for the exploitative, authoritarian, and racist forces of biopower, the article examines the skilled practices and intra-actions of a feminist collective, FEMeeting-Women in Art, Science and Technology. Acknowledging the social relevance of a core community for acquiring immunity and its role for the future, a feminist conception of the virus played a key role in queering all kinds of anthropocentric and essentialist views by biohacking, DIY (Do It Yourself) and DIWO (Do It With Others) techniques in the actions and coproductions of FEMeeting. Of note, the war metaphor operated as a tactic for camouflaging and obfuscating the facts in the course of the pandemic. The findings reveal that paratactical commoning, which is a self-reflexive collective knowledge production in artistic and hacktivist research, emerges as a way in which political ontological potentials can be critically activated within communities of action. The feminist lenses on COVID-19, and the paratactical commoning presented in this article, are of broad interest to systems scientists to explore the ways in which biopower, and the previously unchecked war discourse and militaristic metaphors coproduce COVID-19 acquired immunity and the social injustices. Understanding not only the biology but also the biopolitics of acquired immunity to the control of COVID-19 is, therefore, crucial for systems medicine and planetary (health) care that is at once effective, resilient, foreseeable, and just.

Artistic research within a lab of possibilities: exploring post-digital ignorance in “a’21 amberNetworkFestival”

During COVID-19, the emergence of collective knowledge production networking, the development of common resource pools and resilient commoning practices were thoroughly weakened. In addition, such a paradigmatic crisis has made ignorance and its consequences more visible on a planetary scale. In this article, we asked what kind of research would enable us to explore the possibilities of co-learning and critically reflect on the various forms of ignorance production for the purposes of commoning in a range of settings. Based on laboratory studies in Science, Technology and Society (STS), we aim to explore the contemporary interventions of community building and commoning practices performed in artistic research. Becoming powerful creative forces in their own right, art and technology festivals have augmented the possibilities of how various actors relate to each other, express themselves to wider society, and self-organize in order to challenge current problems on a planetary scale. Our ethnographic study, which included interviews, document analysis, participant observations, case study, game design and online focus group meetings, was based on a hybrid mode of artistic research within a’21 amberNetworkFestival, a co-curated, decentralized and translocal art and technology festival. As a self-reflexive research outcome, the findings of our study reveal that artistic research merging scientific study, online applications, gamification, and performance can be developed for the examination of ignorance production and enhance translocal commoning, co-production and co-learning in various settings. Thus, artistic research within “a lab of possibilities” can allow different communities to collaborate on a common task by providing coordination without consensus.

Transient Political Infrastructures: Toward an Atlas of the Chilean Uprising

The Chilean uprising has been defined by detractors and sympathizers as an “estallido social” or social explosion, alluding to its perceived transient character. Assumptions about spontaneity have similarly underpinned diagnoses of its political significance. It is either a problem to be pacified or limited for generating alternatives. This article problematizes this perceived transience, focusing instead on the event’s rhythms, atmospheres and materialities. The article seeks to contribute to projects of collective knowledge production that underline the need to archive, map and theorise events as lived history. Studying the uprising as lived history does not elicit a particular response but rather initiates an investigation into what it makes possible. The figure of the atlas is developed for such an investigation. An atlas curates the emerging archive by composing images and text, not to close off meaning but rather allow for imagination to enter the realm of knowledge.

Sex Worker Collectives Within the Whorearchy: Intersectional Inquiry with Sex Workers in Los Angeles, CA

Our ability to provide affirming care to individuals who engage in sex work is limited by punitive foundations of social work. This study originates from within the sex worker rights movement. I utilize qualitative dialogues aligned with participatory principles to consider how a Black feminist disability framework can be employed to explore how intersectionality weaves itself into the lives and networks of 13 sex workers in Los Angeles, CA. Specifically, this study engaged in Participatory Action Research (PAR) and collective knowledge production to examine how criminalization operates within larger intersecting systems of oppression and complicates workers’ relationships with each other. The results of this study put forth the conceptualization of the sex worker-informed stratified social hierarchy – described as the “whorearchy” – and the ways that collective care is used to combat it. I conclude with a discussion on centering restorative sex worker narratives in order to examine how criminalization hinders sex worker solidarity and how, similarly, the state's role limits the ways social workers can support sex worker liberation.

Commun numérique de connaissance : définition et conditions d’existence

The term used to describe the projects of collective production of knowledge, especially online, refers to Ostrom & Ostrom's work. Being non-rivalrous, knowledge appears alien to the issues of regulating access and exploitation of rival resources of traditional commons, or of more traditional scientific collaboration collectives. Thanks to three examples of online collective production (Debian, Georezo, Wikipedia), we specify what the shared resource is, and why it is rival. We thus show what the digital knowledge are: socio-technical systems of production of new knowledge. This analysis narrows down, but specifies what can be called knowledge commons and allows us to propose hypotheses on when, and how, commons can appear to organize the production of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge.

Unearthing the Sacred: Padre Luís Jaramillo's Archival Resolana

Padre Luís Jaramillo was a Catholic Diocesan priest who, for over years 60, served numerous communities and was pastor to the Chicano movement in New Mexico as it converged between southern California and Texas. Committed to Chicano self-determination and social justice, Jaramillo was a member of the Black Berets and a founding member of La Academia de La Nueva Raza (1968-1978), a group of scholars, community members, and activists who developed an educational model that responded to the needs of Chicana/o communities through Chicana/o-centered historiography and lived experience. This essay introduces Jaramillo's newly accessioned archive to elucidate how, in the 1970s, he enacted the principles and pedagogy of La Academia through a form of resolana with his parishioners at Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church in Taos, NM, an important place of sanctuary. The digitization of Jaramillo's underscores the significance of recording Indo-Hispano practices of shaping collective memory and knowledge production through lived experience.