Epistemic Communities Research Articles

Communities of Practice in World Politics: Advancing a Research Agenda

Abstract This special forum focuses on international communities of practice (CoP) as a concept and an object of inquiry in International Relations (IR). The Introduction discusses the concept’s origins and how it has entered the field of IR. It addresses why and how CoPs matter to IR scholars by looking at how structure, agency, processes, institutions, and knowledge manifest themselves in communities. This special forum’s main contributions are: (1) capturing the political and economic effects of shared knowledge creation and diffusion through practices; (2) identifying the sources of knowledge production and learning, as well as the normative and political contestation within and between CoPs; (3) studying the social processes that originate at the boundaries between CoPs; (4) examining how people and processes generate, transform, and communicate knowledge; and (5) exploring how CoPs cultivate global governance’s norms, values, and practices from the bottom up. The Introduction also helps distinguish CoP from other relational concepts in IR such as networks, fields, regimes, and epistemic or security communities. It ends by way of situating the contributions to the special forum and outlining a research agenda on CoPs in world politics.

“IPCC-envy”? Shaping global soil and land governance through science-policy activism

AbstractUnderstanding the relationship between science and policy, including the role of actors engaged in facilitating science-policy interplay, is crucial in the study of global environmental governance. In spite of this, theorization of agency in science-policy relations has been limited in the IR field. Concomitantly, limited knowledge exists about the role played in this respect by international bureaucracies. This paper addresses these issues by introducing the concept of science-policy activism. The paper is based on the study of two UN institutions, the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and the Global Soil Partnership (GSP) of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which operate in the issue—area of soil and land degradation. Informed by a combination of elite interviews and participant observation, the study investigates the ways in which the UNCCD and GSP secretariats steer the interplay between scientific advice and policymaking. The qualitative analysis reveals that, although both secretariats engage in normative narratives of cooperation, they actively and competitively pursue self-interested agendas. Unearthing the key role of secretariats in comparison with other relevant actors, such as member states and epistemic communities, the study shows that science-policy activism is conducive to “regime conflict,” limiting opportunities for interplay management and ultimately benefiting the interests of international bureaucracies themselves.

Hungarian Geography between 1870 and 1920: Negotiating Empire and Coloniality on the Global Semiperiphery

Going beyond the conventional approach that locates imperial geographies at either the center or periphery of overseas colonization, this article focuses on coloniality in fin de siècle Hungary to examine the complex negotiation of the colonial project on the global semiperiphery. As a junior partner in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary was simultaneously both an object of Western Europe’s orientalizing gaze and an agent of its own civilizing mission on the nation’s periphery and in the Balkans. Adopting a decolonial framework, we investigate how Hungarian geographers fit themselves into the colonial paradigm and examine their shifting and ambiguous relationship to colonial notions. Beginning with the institutionalization of Hungarian geography in the 1870s and ending with the collapse of Austria-Hungary after World War I, we explore this evolving relationship in light of three factors: (1) the attitudes of Hungarian geographers toward Western imperialism in general and Austro-Hungarian imperialism in the Balkans in particular; (2) the diverse perspectives of Hungarian geographers as thinkers embedded in an epistemic community on the global semiperiphery; and (3) their perspectives on ethno-nationalist conceptualizations of national space. Offering critical insight into the history of fin de siècle Hungarian geography, our study also opens the possibility for comparative discussions regarding the semiperipheral coloniality of other broadly similar cases and the decolonizing of semiperipheral geographies and their pasts.

Unveiling Research Intermediations in Citizen Science

Drawing on the conceptual framework of intermediations in grassroots innovation for sustainability, this paper presents the first in-depth analysis of the role of third sector organizations in citizen science. The empirical data are derived from 31 case studies of associations (representing 80% of third sector organizations in France). We identify two clusters of associations (social innovation and natural sciences) based on research domain. They differ in epistemic cultures, but they both value experiential and actionable knowledge. We present an analytical framework to characterize the role of these associations in citizen science. Derived from systemic intermediations for transitions, this framework is based on the association’s position in networks, infrastructures, and projects. Our results reveal four categories, three of which are intermediations that depend on the organization’s position in the network, the degree of structuration of its partnerships with academics, and the goals and achievements of the projects in which it is involved. Associations do not only articulate different knowledge in projects, they also contribute to organizational learning in networks. In addition, associations perform the boundary work required to build hybrid infrastructures with institutions. A fourth category unveils the complexity of structuring hybrid epistemic communities for sustainability. This four-way categorization of intermediations highlights the crucial roles of associations in a systemic approach to citizen science.

The Customer Success Community: An Exploration of Nonfirm Epistemic Communities and Their Influence on a New Sales Practice

Customer success (CS) management is being implemented across global business markets. CS management is unique, as it exists within a broader CS community of professionals who actively support the new customer management practice. However, academic research has yet to investigate nonfirm epistemic communities (i.e., knowledge communities related to a specific domain) that support CS management and how they differ across geographic settings in ways that may affect the overall practice of CS management. To address this gap, the authors investigate how the CS community is implemented across countries that vary in their levels of uncertainty avoidance. The authors focus on the CS community and its impact on CS management operational factors that represent people, process, and performance factors of CS management. Following a phenomenological approach, interviews from the United States, Brazil, and Portugal drive the findings and indicate different levels of reliance on the external CS community to guide internal CS management operational factors. This research contributes by establishing the importance of the CS community and by uncovering insights based on CS managers’ perceptions of the CS community and its effect on CS management operational factors. The authors offer salient insights into how managers can optimize CS management operational factors, and they provide a discussion of future research topics.

Who controls the curriculum? Notes on disciplinary communities from Ivor Goodson

The present study investigates the devaluation of specialised teaching knowledge and the prioritisation of general education based on competencies and skills at the secondary level in Brazil. The dissolution of the curricular disciplinary organisation poses a risk to teaching identities, and understanding how teachers constitute epistemic and disciplinary communities is crucial. Public imposed policies that are distant from the reality of schools tend to be rejected by the agents involved in the school process. In Brazil, the National Curriculum Basis, a high school common core, is an example of a legal document that does not engage in dialogue with the cultural diversity in Brazil, while discredit the specific formation of teachers. From a historical approach, this research analyses the polysemy of school subjects towards the teacher’s specialised identities. The methodological dispositive comprises narratives from specialist high school teachers in Biology, Physics, and Chemistry. Understanding how professionals organise themselves provides insight into the mechanisms of control and mediation in producing curriculum as socio-historical artifacts from power relationships and disputes. The struggle for control highlights the importance of teachers' agency in confrontation with neoliberal ideals for education and organising in subject or epistemic communities.

‘Populism’ and competing epistemic communities in English educational policy: A response to Craske and Watson

AbstractThis article constitutes a ‘reply and alternative’ to two papers that appeared in a 2021 Special Issue of British Educational Research Journal. Both articles drew on theories of populism as a political logic to explain recent trends in England's education policy. I begin by highlighting how the contributors mobilise ‘populist’ political logics within their own ‘anti‐populist’ discourse. I then argue that the theory of epistemic communities, borrowed from the field of public policy analysis, offers an alternative interpretation of the dynamics described in (and exemplified by) the two articles. This alternative interpretation foregrounds the values, beliefs and policy enterprises of two rival communities that seek to influence education policy through the supply of expertise. I argue that attending to how these communities function helps explain how a new group of policy entrepreneurs has come to constitute an increasingly influential ‘counter‐epistemic community’ and established a mutually beneficial trade in legitimacy with English policy makers. To date, the theory of epistemic communities has been under‐utilised in the study of education policy, but applying the theory to education policy in England provides new insights into how these communities function when the nature of expertise is contested. England's educational policy context also exemplifies the importance of ‘fit’ between policy makers and experts’ beliefs, and the role of policy makers in assembling and curating communities of experts.

Fractures overseen: soviet medical experts splitting from the international epistemic community during the interwar period

ABSTRACT Soviet medical science went through a deep and systematic transformation. Initiated in the very early days of the Communist regime, a moment of disrupting and isolating impact uprooted it from its former organizational and epistemic foundations and re-adjusted the expert output and modus operandi to state needs. Professional identities, paradigmatic approaches and everyday practices resulting from these were transformed and forcibly aligned with the expectations of the new powerholders, aligned with the newly formulated party-bound loyalties and secured by the broad array of severe sanctions. This article systematically approaches the dark side of the Soviet interwar transformation in medicine with a special focus on a sample of psychiatric experts. The paper analyses the entanglement between domestic pressures exercised upon scholars by the emerging totalitarianism, forcing them to detach and considerably re-adjust their international ties, while nonetheless trying to remain a part of this cross-border epistemic community. While international contacts did not cease entirely, their expanse, intensity and the very mode of cooperation had to change dramatically so as to fit the new regime´s vision upon medicine. International networks were re-appropriated for the sake of promoting the success of the Communist state, with scholars functioning as involuntary ambassadors of the regime. Though perfectly compatible with the practices and outputs of their fellow experts elsewhere across the globe while exposed to the permanent pressure of political terror at home, Soviet public health and its experts became deeply transformed and detached in manifold ways from their peers and their medical science. Largely overlooked, the early fractures of the interwar period carry on into the Cold War-influenced second half of the twentieth century.

The economics columnists elite as an epistemic community: a network analysis (2019-2021)

Resumo O objetivo deste artigo é analisar os colunistas de economia dos principais jornais brasileiros a partir do conceito de comunidade epistêmica. Para tanto, o artigo realizou uma prosopografia desses colunistas e, em seguida, analisou os dados coletados por meio da análise de redes sociais. O trabalho revela, por um lado, a pluralidade da rede quando analisada a partir da formação acadêmica e, por outro, a centralidade dos colunistas ortodoxos quando se leva em conta a trajetória profissional completa deles, algo que reforçaria a utilidade do conceito de comunidade epistêmica.

Epistemic Communities in American Public Law

Epistemic Communities in American Public Law

Scoping Arctic expertise: The mismatch between traditional theories of expertise and Indigenous expertise

Abstract While much work on expertise has explored the mobilisation and production of knowledge, the development of epistemic communities, and the mechanisms through which expertise operates – little work has been done exploring how expertise is understood across academic literature on particular regional cases such as the Arctic. In this article, I scope a broad literature review of the Arctic, seeking out how expertise has been depicted and framed in academic and theoretical literature. The results are framed around five different themes: (1) expertise serving the interests of great powers, (2) recognition of the overall importance of expertise in Arctic governance, (3) the purpose of experts, (4) science diplomacy and expertise: a murky barrier, and (5) how to study experts, but also find that Indigenous knowledge is often left out of literature that relies upon Western frameworks of expertise. This incongruity suggests that there are two competing conceptualizations of Arctic expertise, one in theory and another in practice – which has consequences for how the region and its expertise are narrated.

Feyerabend and Decolonisation

The last decade has seen a dramatic increase in literature on decolonisation of knowledge. The impression often given in recent literature is of wholesale neglect of the concerns of the decolonisation literature in what might be called ‘Western thought’ of preceding decades. This paper argues that Feyerabend was a notable figure within Western epistemic communities who expressed positions analogous to those of proponents of decolonisation. The first section presents the most striking contributions from Feyerabend’s work that, I suggest, bear on questions of decolonisation. Four specific issues are identified based on those: the curriculum and the role of universities; the inspirational role of student protests; the concept of ‘epistemicide’; and, indigenous knowledge systems. The second section suggests a range of limitations of, and weaknesses in, Feyerabend’s analysis: no substantive engagement with history or literature on decolonisation; implicitly accepting the Сclaimed inherent association of science, rationalism and various forms of modernity with Western countries and cultures; the (rhetorical) construction of an unnecessary binary choice between science and traditional knowledge systems; underplaying agency through a form of othering; creating an unnecessarily stark binary of Western science and non-Western indigenous knowledge; and, as a consequence of all these, providing no substantive analysis of how science might be integrated with other knowledge systems and cultures. The concluding section provides a brief summary and identifies areas for future work.

Southern turn, Northern implications: rethinking the meaning of colonial legacies for Comparative Constitutional Studies

Comparative constitutional studies has not digested globalization and the emergence of a multipolar world. To do so, I argue here, would require a far more serious engagement with Southern experiences of constitutionalism, including colonial legacies and a past that lingers on in legal doctrine, conceptual vocabulary, methodology and institutional structures. Such a Southern turn is not only about the South but equally about the North and the entanglement of North and South. In fact, colonial legacies are equally relevant but much less understood in the North. The Southern turn is hence a double turn: to the South and then to the North and the world. This article sketches how to rethink methodologies and approaches to comparative constitutional scholarship and discusses the notion of the Global South in that context. In doing so, it demonstrates how a Southern turn would both provide new insights into constitutionalism in the South as much as in the North and open up new avenues to rethink constitutional theory. Such rethinking enters tricky terrain as colonial legacies play out differently in different places and epistemic communities. This article is a call for a common conversation nonetheless. It is an intellectual provocation and invitation to develop an approach to comparative constitutional scholarship and ‘world comparative law’ that does not bow to any one centre and instead engages with the distinctive but entangled constitutional regimes all over the world.

Epistemic Responsibility and Community Engagement in Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift

HIV/AIDS has pervasively affected the health and well-being of South African women, as evidenced by their exacerbating mortality rates over the decades. Sindiwe Magona’s Beauty’s Gift (2008) is a critical intervention in this regard because, in focusing on the death of a young black woman owing to her infection with HIV/AIDS, it critiques the overarching and ingrained patriarchal ideologies that are hindering the treatment and prevention of this disease. The article seeks to examine Magona’s text as uncovering the lack of appropriate knowledge about HIV/AIDS, and the silencing of South African women in the articulation or dissemination of this disease-related knowledge. The article argues that Magona’s text emphasizes the delinking of taboos and highlights the necessity of the South African community’s engagement at micro and macro levels regarding HIV/AIDS. This engagement reflects an epistemic responsibility that is crucial to reducing the dreadful impact of this illness from both cultural and structural perspectives.

Contextualizing Kurdish Gender Studies

Abstract Established in 2020, the Kurdish Gender Studies Network (KGSN) is an online epistemic community that brings together activists and scholars dedicated to advancing knowledge in Kurdish gender and sexuality studies. This paper aims to introduce the network to a larger public while situating the formation of the KGSN in relation to the growth of Kurdish gender studies (KGS), and the increasing influence of women and queer scholars in Kurdish studies (KS) since 2010. It highlights that both KGSN and KS have been greatly influenced by the conditions shaped by the colonial legacy surrounding Kurdistan and the Kurdish issue while discussing the ways in which Kurdish women’s and gender studies were often marginalized in KS. As Kurdish women scholars and members of the network’s steering committee, we position the trajectory of the network and the evolution of KGS within the broader framework of knowledge production in colonial contexts and address the ongoing struggle to decolonize feminist knowledge production, which, historically, has been dominated by Western-centric epistemologies and methodologies.

Beyond the Land of Thorns: Epistemic Authorship in Dual Language Bilingual Education

Using an ethico-epistemic lens that integrates Latina decolonizing feminist thought, I examine the ways in which Latina dual language teachers in a Dual Language Bilingual Education (DLBE) program in Massachusetts mobilized epistemic authorship to address knowledge-based injustices that they experienced at work. The teachers enacted epistemic authorship by inscribing experiential, relational, and healing epistemic practices and communities as vehicles for hope and possibility. I argue that epistemic authorship is a crucial dimension of critically conscious DLBE teacher preparation.

Epistemic injustice through transformative learning

Abstract In this paper, I argue that epistemic injustice can result from transformative learning. Transformative learning causes a radical change in the structure of a student’s personal epistemic resources to bring them in line with the structure of a discipline’s shared epistemic resources. When those shared epistemic resources are biased, this transformation prevents students from retaining aspects of their personal epistemic resources which it is strongly in their interests (as well as in the interests of the broader epistemic community) to retain. In these cases, transformative learning causes epistemic injustice in the form of inferential injustice.

Welcome Address Pivoting the South African Association of Public Administration and Management as an Epistemic Community for Global Justice is Key to Re-Theorising Statecraft

Welcome Address Pivoting the South African Association of Public Administration and Management as an Epistemic Community for Global Justice is Key to Re-Theorising Statecraft

The task and future of New Testament Studies

In the light of various new tendencies in New Testament Studies, this article charts out the task for future students and researchers in the field. Within the frame of newer socio-cognitive discourse studies, it builds on the semiotic foundation that controlled interpretation of the ancient Greek text as a complex sign-system enabling the community of professional readers to construct meaning fitting the text. Such interpretations need to simulate the interpretation process within the original epistemic community. The article aims to reassess the role of exegesis in Testament Studies and a redesign of its sub-disciplines.Contribution: The article makes an original contribution to realign the hermeneutical task to interpret the text in the New Testament with socio-cognitive discourse studies. It follows trends in reception studies in distinguishing semantic interpretation from the various uses of such consensual text and conforms to interpretation of the New Testament in the realm of faculties of theology and within academic and public discourse.

Orchestrating orphan ideas in the fuzzy front end of a large firm's R&D department

The fuzzy front end is the critical initial step of an innovation process during which new ideas emerge. This step's functioning is well understood when the ideas produced are in line with the organisation's directions or roadmap. In that case, there are a variety of managerial methods available to guide, filter and control the development of ideas while reducing the associated risks. However, we know considerably less about the emergence and development of orphan ideas, that is ideas that are not aligned with the firm's strategic roadmap. Such orphan ideas are beyond the scope of managers because they are not consistent with the orientations and needs identified by the firm. The aim of this article is to start to fill this gap through the qualitative study of three unexpected ideation processes at Hydro‐Québec's research institute. Our data reveal a process characterised by a complicated intertwinement of formal and informal mechanisms and relationships. In particular, our results show that informal groups, which can be assimilated to epistemic communities, play a major role in the orchestration of the first stages of the journey of orphan ideas by taking charge of the development of the value proposition and of the idea's integration in the firm's managerial and strategic framework. Further, managing orphan ideas requires specific managerial devices and social mechanisms.