Geography Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

Geography of Knowledge Production in European Urban Studies

The production of scientific knowledge in urban studies is not evenly distributed. Studies produced in some academic centres are cited more frequently than others and have a larger impact on the academic community. This article traces the spatial concentration of urban studies in European countries over the last decade. On a theoretical level, it refers to the theory of dependent development, distinguishing areas of global core, periphery and semi-periphery, and applying this theory to the production of academic knowledge.Based on the bibliometric data of articles from selected renowned international journals, the article constructs a synthetic index of the centrality of academic knowledge production in urban studies, developed in the academic centres of individual countries. In particular, it draws attention to the peripheral or semi-peripheral position of almost all Central and Eastern European countries.

Urban theory of/from the Global South: a systematic review of issues, challenges, and pathways of decolonization

Urban studies in recent decades have acknowledged that the cities of the Global South are epistemically, methodologically, and empirically different. However, the theorizations of Southern cities continue to be considered outside mainstream urban theories. In addition, there remains discrepancies and imbalance in the production of scholarships in southern cities. In addition to Southern urbanism knowledge being predominantly produced in the geographical West, scholars based in the Global South experience growing marginalization as a result of access, affordances, and knowledge production politics. With increasing discussions around the politics of visibility and institutional affiliations, this study aims to systematically map and analyze the dynamics and geography of knowledge production in the field. First, a scientometric review of this study unpacks the plethora of urban theory and related publications that theorizes the Global South and places them according to where and by whom this was published. Second, this study traces the need for urban theory and the production of knowledge following the decolonization agenda to be produced by and for the south. Finally, it closes by addressing the ways forward to progress urban theory and empirics from the south through the production and coproduction of knowledge for and by the south.

Eastern Europe and the geography of knowledge production: The case of the invisible gardener

The article contributes to the debates in geography on the inequality of knowledge production and the context-dependent hierarchy of knowledge claims. It seeks to make sense of the invisibility, to Western academia, of East European informal food provisioning as a research topic with the potential to inform debates and theorisations regarding alternative food systems. Looking at how East European informal food practices have been read from the West is instructive for understanding how certain knowledge ‘travels’ and becomes universally accepted knowledge – or theory – or remains a partial knowledge with validity restricted to specific places and circulating within specific subfields.

Grief as method: topographies of grief, care, and fieldwork from Northwest Arkansas to New York and the Marshall Islands

When we grieve during fieldwork, our grief forms new geographies of knowledge production and emotion. In this article, I use autoethnography to theorize my grief during fieldwork following the death of my sister. I examine grief’s methodological implications using the concept of ‘grief as method,’ an emotionally-inflected practice that accounts for the vulnerability produced by grief. By centering vulnerability, ‘grief as method’ also urges researchers to consider the practices and politics of ‘caring with’ our research subjects and caring for ourselves, raising larger questions about the role of care in research. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how grief’s geographical features—its mobility, its emergence in new sites and landscapes, and its manifestation as both proximity and distance—shape ‘grief as method’ profoundly. I examine grief’s spatial implications by building on Katz’s ‘topography’ to theorize a ‘topography of grief’ that stitches together the emotional geographies of researchers, blurring both spatial divisions (‘the field’ vs. ‘the not-field’) and methodological ones (the ‘researcher-self’ vs. the ‘personal-self’). If we see grief as having a topography, then the relationships between places darkened by grief come into focus. Moreover, by approaching grief methodologically, we can better understand how field encounters—relationships between people—are forged through grief. ‘Grief as method,’ in offering a spatial analysis of grief’s impact on fieldwork, envisions a broader definition of what engaged research looks like and where it takes place.

The map is not the territory: A sympathetic critique of energy research’s spatial turn

Energy research in the social sciences has embarked on a ‘spatial adventure’ (Castán Broto and Baker, 2017). Those setting out on this journey have started from different disciplinary and theoretical locations, yet a “map” of sorts has begun to emerge. Made up of epistemological positions, conceptual vantage points and lines of enquiry, this map demarcates and structures the growing field of energy geography providing a more-or-less agreed guide to the territory. In the paper's first half I reflect on the scope and significance of the spatial turn in energy research. I describe the map now guiding much spatial research on energy, identifying core ideas around which spatially-sensitive social science energy research has come to cohere, notwithstanding its heterogeneity and internal diversity. I offer a supportive reading. In the second half, I offer a more critical reading of the adventure so far, arguing that it is unnecessarily limited in its reading of space. The full potential of a spatial perspective for social science research on energy has yet to be realised. I outline three pathways for realising some of this potential – geographies of knowledge production, differentiation and disassembly – and show how each takes energy research's spatial adventure in new directions.

Map the gap: alternative visualisations of geographic knowledge production

The main purpose of this paper is to develop a new method for visualizing knowledge production which is attentive to the multiple elements embedded in research processes. In particular, we seek to problematise the representation of scholarship indicators by depicting theoretical contributions and field sites along a spectrum, rather than as discrete points, recursively and relationally constituted. The primary aim of our visualisations is to capture text and context, and codified and tacit knowledge. First, we offer a conventional representation of the location of selected dominant critical theories in Geography, arguing that current methods reinforce ‘lopsided’ geographies of knowledge production. Normative practices of data visualisation and representation captured in our two examples privilege certain elements centred on authorship and tend to silence the contexts informing research. Second, we borrow the term and method of chromatography, a tool used in the natural sciences but here conceived in its more literal sense of ‘writing the separations’. Our ‘chromatographical’ representations attempt to unbundle components currently absorbed by formal indicators of knowledge production. Such counter mappings attempt to convey the relational aspect of research between countries imbricated in the propagation of exemplary critical geographic theories. We conclude with a discussion of the implications that the disaggregation of value has for scholars and their research.

Unveiling the geography of historical patents in the United States from 1836 to 1975.

It is clear that technology is a key driver of economic growth. Much less clear is where new technologies are produced and how the geography of U.S. invention has changed over the last two hundred years. Patent data report the geography, history, and technological characteristics of invention. However, those data have only recently become available in digital form and at the present time there exists no comprehensive dataset on the geography of knowledge production in the United States prior to 1975. The database presented in this paper unveils the geography of historical patents granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) from 1836 to 1975. This historical dataset, HistPat, is constructed using digitalized records of original patent documents that are publicly available. We describe a methodological procedure that allows recovery of geographical information on patents from the digital records. HistPat can be used in different disciplines ranging from geography, economics, history, network science, and science and technology studies. Additionally, it is easily merged with post-1975 USPTO digital patent data to extend it until today.

Recentering Centers of Calculation: Global companies and the geography of knowledge production

The formation of the first chartered companies during the seventeenth century created organizations of unprecedented scope, size and complexity. While numerous studies have explored the economic an...

The State of Urban Agendas in Norwegian Development Research and Policy

The article explores the geographies of knowledge production about urban Africa in the Norwegian context. Norwegian development debates have responded slowly and reluctantly to urban transformations in Africa. However, there seems to be an emerging focus on African cities both in research and in policy circles. This agenda has much to gain from a growing international literature that challenges existing approaches to African cities. These scholars argue that research and development policy debate continues to represent African cities as dysfunctional exceptionalisms from Western urban experiences or as places where complex urban dynamics of inclusion and exclusion can be solved by policy interventions. Thus, the urban agenda must move beyond what has been labelled the ‘shackles of developmentalism’. The article identifies similar divides in knowledge production in the Norwegian context and critically assesses the state of urban agendas in Norwegian development policies. I argue that policies and debates tend to reproduce similar representations about urbanism, or the lack thereof, to the ones identified in the critical international literature on urban development issues. These representations must be challenged and reworked in order for us to grasp the complexities of African cities and to start developing appropriate political responses.

New Silicon Valleys or a new species? Commoditization of knowledge work and the rise of knowledge services clusters

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in developing countries: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge services. Based on prior research on clusters and services offshoring, and data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN), major properties and contingencies of KSC growth are discussed and compared with both high-tech clusters and low-cost manufacturing clusters. Special emphasis is put on the ambivalent effect of commoditization of knowledge work on KSC growth: It is proposed that KSCs attract most client projects if service commoditization is medium, whereas higher or lower commoditization either increases global competitive pressure or lowers demand and economies of scale and scope. KSC attractiveness is further related to the perceived availability of skills at relatively low costs, and cluster connectedness with client economies through corporate networks and professional communities. Findings not only advance current debates on clusters, global services sourcing, and the geography of knowledge production, but also have important policy implications.

New Silicon Valleys or a New Species? Commoditization of Knowledge Work and the Rise of Knowledge Services Clusters

This paper explores knowledge services clusters (KSCs) as a distinct and increasingly important form of geographic cluster, in particular in emerging economies: KSCs are defined as geographic concentrations of lower-cost skills serving global demand for increasingly commoditized knowledge services. Based on prior research on clusters and services offshoring, and data from the Offshoring Research Network (ORN), major properties and contingencies of KSC growth are discussed and compared with both high-tech clusters and low-cost manufacturing clusters. Special emphasis is put on the ambivalent effect of commoditization of knowledge work on KSC growth: It is proposed that KSCs attract most projects if service commoditization is medium, whereas higher or lower commoditization either increases global competitive pressure or lowers demand and economies of scale and scope. KSC attractiveness is further related to the perceived availability of skills at relatively low costs, and cluster connectedness with client economies through corporate networks and professional communities. Findings not only advance current debates on clusters, global services sourcing, and the geography of knowledge production, but also have important policy implications.

Virtualization and new geographies of knowledge in higher education: possibilities for the transformation of knowledge, pedagogic relations and learner identities

This article considers some of the ways in which the transformative power of Web 2.0 digital technology is reconfiguring learning, knowledge and academic identities in the contemporary university. Through a focus on five specific examples, we consider the impact of virtualization processes on spatiality, materiality and embodiment, and pedagogic relations. We argue for the benefits of taking a microsociological approach in order to reflect on the potential of virtualization to bring about new geographies of knowledge production and as a means to identify the ways in which potential transformations are uneven, problematic and contested.

The Geography of Planning Practice

Planning practice is a contingent situated activity. The anatomy of planning practice may be understood as a structure of communicative action involving claims regarding content and context, thus systematically presenting questions and demanding judgments in the face both of uncertainty and of ambiguity. Practical communicative claims are established in the planning process through the ongoing social reproduction of beliefs, consent, trust, and attention. If planners are to be sensitive to these processes of social reproduction, they must be attentive to four dimensions of the geography of their practice: a cognitive geography of knowledge production, a political-legal geography of power and consent, a ritual geography of social identity, and an economic-resource geography of attention. Recognizing this structure and field of practical action, planners may enhance social learning, resisting threats to democratizing movements, in part by distinguishing and protecting learning processes in two dimensions, the technical and the practical. Refusing to reduce issues of normative ambiguity to issues of technical uncertainty, planners may themselves continue to learn about the political and normative aspects of their practice and so foster, rather than render apolitical, democratic social-learning processes.

Mapping the fields. Geographies of knowledge production. Et forskningsprosjekt om romlige-digitale-arkivale sammenfiltringer

Mapping the Fields: Geographies of Knowledge Production, is ahumanities experiment, exploring fieldworks of the nineteenth century. By studyingfieldworks, the project investigates production and circulation of knowledge,and the role of space and place in these practices. Furthermore, and that is theconcern of this article, Mapping the Fields is one possible answer to an ongoingdiscussion about how the building of a database, data model, and digital mapsmay be fruitful for research related to Norwegian Folklore Archives. The projectengages the general idea of mapping as a process within network relations. In thisarticle, it is argued that concepts developed in relations between geography andliterature studies are fruitful within a Culture History approach to Spatial History.The article problematizes how “the digital” stabilizes “facts” and contributes toinspiration, new research questions and new knowledge.