Regime Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

Teaching at the Tension Points: The Ethical Challenges of International Experiential Learning

This 40-minute presentation will discuss the ethical challenges of international experiential learning programs. It will draw on the authors’ experiences developing the Indonesian Institute for Social Sciences and Human Rights, a program that brings U.S. and Indonesian students together to work in collaborative partnerships learning about ethnographic methods and their relationship to social justice work. Located in Jogjakarta, Java, Indonesia, the program asks students to consider the epistemologies and ethics of collaborative research methodologies. Moving beyond traditional study abroad practices that position Indonesian students and scholars as sources of local “data” to be extracted for the academic empowerment of their cosmopolitan visiting counterparts, this program opens a valuable space for students to not only question issues of culture and method, but to reflect upon their participation in global regimes of knowledge production. At the same time, by intentionally highlighting the fault lines that mark cultural, national and disciplinary boundaries, the program reliably generates high levels of personal anxiety and community conflict among students, demanding innovative pedagogical strategies for transforming tension into productive learning and dialogue. In this presentation, we will not arrive at a fixed set of ethics for international experiential learning, rather we will explore ethics as a space of ongoing inquiry and engagement. We anticipate that this presentation will be of interest to faculty, staff and students from a range of disciplines who are designing and engaging in international experiential learning programs.

Crowd science: The organization of scientific research in open collaborative projects

A growing amount of scientific research is done in an open collaborative fashion, in projects sometimes referred to as “crowd science”, “citizen science”, or “networked science”. This paper seeks to gain a more systematic understanding of crowd science and to provide scholars with a conceptual framework and an agenda for future research. First, we briefly present three case examples that span different fields of science and illustrate the heterogeneity concerning what crowd science projects do and how they are organized. Second, we identify two fundamental elements that characterize crowd science projects – open participation and open sharing of intermediate inputs – and distinguish crowd science from other knowledge production regimes such as innovation contests or traditional “Mertonian” science. Third, we explore potential knowledge-related and motivational benefits that crowd science offers over alternative organizational modes, and potential challenges it is likely to face. Drawing on prior research on the organization of problem solving, we also consider for what kinds of tasks particular benefits or challenges are likely to be most pronounced. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research and by discussing implications for funding agencies and policy makers.

Time Travelers and Queer Heterotopias: Narratives from the Muslim Underground

This article suggests the existence of a spatio-temporal regime of knowledge production in Germany that configures racialized populations as a contradiction in terms, both spatially and temporally displaced within a heteronormative discourse of nation, gender, sexuality, and religion that assigns communities of color a position both outside Europe and outside modernity. This regime is currently most evident in discourses around the nation's Muslim communities as living in ostensibly archaic, anti-modern “parallel societies.” Using the trope of travel narratives and their employment of gender and sexuality, I trace the epistemological placement of “German” and “Muslim” as mutually exclusive opposites and end by proposing that this (dis)placement is not only a source of exclusion but also potentially the means by which alternative spatio-temporal models emerge that defy this opposition and the social logic behind it.

Lusophonia vs. Lusutopia, MLA vs. MTA

Lusophonia vs. Lusutopia, MLA vs. MTA

Boundary work between research communities: Culture and power in a French nanosciences and nanotechnology hub

Today, nanoscience and nanotechnology (NS/T) is one of the most visible domains of scientific activity. Its promises rest especially on a convergence dynamics that brings various research communities closer together. This convergence is interdisciplinary, but it also renews links between applied and basic science. Nanoscale-related folk myths and economic expectations are well documented, as are interventions of policymakers. Lab-level relations have on the other hand been less studied. Based on a qualitative study conducted in one of France’s main NS/T centres, this article shows how researchers experience boundaries in the workplace. Indeed, as local physicists are prompted to plan heterogeneous projects, they stress the importance of cultural and professional distinctions between local research communities. If Shinn’s ‘regimes of knowledge production’ offer useful conceptual tools to make sense of interactions and distinctions in this science and technology hub, the cultural dimension of exchanges and resistances has nevertheless to be emphasized in this framework. For the interviewed scientists, professional boundary work has furthermore a clear political meaning, while their collective rhetoric is also a way to claim credit in the local competition for institutional favours.

Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920 by Brian Frehner (review)

Reviewed by: Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920 by Brian Frehner Dolly Jørgensen (bio) Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920. By Brian Frehner. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011. Pp. xiii+232. $50. In Brian Frehner's Finding Oil, contestations over knowledge of the seen and unseen take center stage. When the search for oil began in the nineteenth century, underground geological structures could not be observed in a direct way. Prospectors knew that Earth's depths held hidden riches, but they needed to make sense of the invisible to know where to drill a well to find oil. Frehner argues that the oil hidden from view "challenged prospectors to encounter nature both physically and intellectually in order to locate, extract, and control the resource they sought" (p. 4). By looking at this challenge to understand nature, Frehner frames his inquiry as both environmental history and history of science. Frehner's narrative brings to light some of the debates and personalities that shaped how oil was found in the early days of commercial oil production, from 1859 when the first commercial well was drilled in Pennsylvania to 1920 when seismic technology came into use for oil discovery. Petroleum geology evolved out of struggles for authority between different kinds of knowledge, primarily in opposition to the knowledge of "practical men," eventually becoming a mainstay in the quest for oil. The book is organized into three parts around knowledge-production regimes. The first part, "Local Knowledge," has two chapters on the search for oil in Pennsylvania during the nineteenth century. Knowledge of a place, based on fieldwork at a particular locale, was vital to the early search for oil. Frehner argues that this knowledge invoked the senses—looking, smelling, and touching. "Practical oil men," a contemporary label for prospectors who used landscape observations to decide where to drill, relied on field experience to strike oil. Geologists followed the same mode of knowledge production, relying on fieldwork during geological surveys and mapmaking to create visual representations of hidden strata. In the second part, "Contested Knowledge," Frehner moves west with the oil prospectors to examine this interplay of context-specific knowledge generated by practical men and universal principles esteemed by geologists. Early theories about where to find oil (near creek beds and along belt-lines) based on field experience were soon supplemented by geological theories explaining oil's location. We see this in the history of Tom Slick, a practical man with a knack for finding oil. After he discovered the Cushing field in Oklahoma, geologists showed that the drilling success was consistent with the theory of anticlines, which bolstered the reputation of geology. At the same time, universities began geology educational programs that churned out students destined for work in the oil industry. The University of Oklahoma program, which gets the spotlight in this section, incorporated substantial [End Page 202] fieldwork in order to train geologists in reading landscapes. The educational tactic was a blending of practical and theoretical knowledge. The final part, "Appropriated Knowledge," gives us the story of the integration of petroleum geologists in Empire Gas and Fuel in the 1910s. Empire struggled with finding young geologists with enough practical knowledge to be useful in the field. The company soon discovered that applying geological knowledge did not immediately lead to increased oil production, and many of its early attempts at integrating geologists did not last. It did, however, found the first department in an oil company devoted to subsurface geology. Frehner relies heavily on biographical sketches of people who shaped the early development of petroleum geology to drive the narrative. While these make the book easy to read, there is a tendency to draw overarching conclusions from the events of one person's life. For example, J. Peter Lesley's experiences at the Pennsylvania Geological Survey in the 1800s are presented as typical battles over geological professional authority and trends toward collaboration, rather than as unique situations caused by Lesley's opinionated personality. It is similarly unclear how influential the University of Oklahoma's geology department really was on the development of petroleum geology education nationwide. While Frehner examines the intersection of the environment...

1 - Globalizing Higher Education for Neo-liberal Development in Postcolonial Mozambique

This article examines the ways in which neo-liberal discourses of globalization and development have been used to imagine and enact higher education in Mozambique. It argues that higher education developments in Mozambique in the past fifteen years are not only reflective of free market economy logic, but also ignore the social and historical contextualities, a course which deepens social inequalities. Using a postcolonial perspective to de-naturalize neo-liberal regimes of knowledge production, the article analyses how the course of higher education in Mozambique is indicative of broader social (trans)formations. It shows how the policy framework evokes and puts to work a set of technologies such as self-empowerment, self-regulation and a culture of managerialism to enforce the belief that individuals can make choices to fulfil their hopes of improving lives through higher education. It also argues that this belief does not take into account how such technologies of hope are configuring power relations which may lead, in the long run, to social inequalities because very few households can afford access to higher education.

Crowd Science: The Organization of Scientific Research in Open Collaborative Projects

A growing amount of scientific research is done in an open collaborative fashion, in projects that are sometimes labeled as “crowd science”, “citizen science”, or “networked science”. This paper seeks to gain a more systematic understanding of crowd science and to provide scholars with a conceptual framework and an agenda for future research. First, we briefly present three case examples that span different fields of science and illustrate the heterogeneity concerning what crowd science projects do and how they are organized. Second, we identify two fundamental elements that characterize crowd science projects - open participation and open sharing of intermediate inputs - and distinguish crowd science from other knowledge production regimes such as innovation contests or traditional “Mertonian” science. Third, we explore potential knowledge-related and motivational benefits that crowd science offers over alternative organizational modes, and potential challenges it is likely to face. Drawing on prior research on the organization of problem solving, we also consider for what kinds of tasks particular benefits or challenges are likely to be most pronounced. We conclude by outlining an agenda for future research and by discussing implications for funding agencies and policy makers.

From a political anthropology to an anthropology of policy: interview with Cris Shore

Cris Shore is one of the few anthropologists who have been studying “the makings of politics” and has put forward creative bridges connecting anthropology, political science, organisational studies and sociology. Shore is currently Chair of Anthropology and Head of Department at the University of Auckland (New Zealand), after lecturing at the Goldsmiths College, University of ­London (UK), between 1990 and 2003. Shore’s works include titles such as Anthropology of Policy: Critical Perspectives on Governance and Power (edited with Susan Wright, Routledge, 1997) and the recent Policy Worlds: Anthropology and the Analysis of Contemporary Power (edited with Susan Wright and Davide Pero, Berghahn, 2010), focusing on the cultural uses and meanings of politics in different social contexts, or Corruption: Anthropological Perspectives (edited with Dieter Haller, Pluto, 2005). But Europe’s inter-nationalist project has been a strong presence in Shore’s work since The Anthropology of Europe: Identities and Boundaries in Conflict was published in 1994 (edited with Victoria Goddard and Josep Llobera, Berg). Research on European integration policies, namely through the project “Constructing European Identity: EU Civil Servants and Cultural Policy”, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), led him to conduct fieldwork in different offices of the European Union’s institutions in Brussels from 1995 to 1997, giving rise to Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration (Routledge, 2000) and European Union and the Politics of Culture (Bruges Group, 2001). Further research interests include the debates about the meaning of ‘European government’, institutional reforms and UE’s role as a global actor. Along with Marilyn Strathern, Susan Wright and others, Cris Shore was one of the first researchers to approach a most original topic in anthropological studies in the 1990s: audit cultures. Guest editor of a special issue of Anthropology in Action on “Universities and the politics of accountability” (with Don ­Brenneis and Susan Wright, 2005), Shore has done research on university reforms and the economy of knowledge, using ethnographic methods to study the new labour and knowledge production regimes at universities, as well as the notions of person and subjectivity involved in them. General anthropological themes such as the discipline’s methodological and epistemological distinctive features were explored by Shore in works like Anthropology and Cultural Studies (edited with Stephen Nugent, Pluto, 1997) or The Future of Anthropology: Its Relevance to the Contemporary World (edited with Akbar Ahmed, Athlone Press, 1995). Cris Shore is currently engaged in an ethnographic study of universities in New Zealand. This is part of a wider international collaborative project between The University of Auckland, Aarhus University (Denmark), and Bristol University (UK) entitled “University Reform, Globalisation and Europeanization”, which is funded by an EU Marie-Curie IRSES grant and the New Zealand Ministry of Research Science and Technology.

Produzir saberes entre aderência e desaderência

This article discusses the concept of development. This is done assuming that life is a permanent negotiation between obligation of living according to demands and cohertions from the present local-spatial, and different kinds of antecedent rules instituted from a distance of these local adherences. In this sense, it is proposed an ethical and epistemological posture that creates a new regime of knowledge production taking into consideration the knowledge and values developed by the local social authors. Key words: developement, ergology, knowledge, work.

Secrets and Keys: Psychoanalysis, Modernism, and Film in the Curious Cases of Musil's Törless and Pabst's Geheimnisse Einer Seele

This essay is concerned with the particular form of curiosity that emerges in the first decades of the twentieth century in the network of relations between psychoanalysis, film, and Modernist writing. In its opening, theoretical section, it considers how Freud constructs curiosity for his project, applying a Benjaminian focus to show how the allegorical forms that that project takes raise questions that go beyond psychoanalysis to more general regimes of knowledge production and consumption. This framework is applied first to a literary text with a cinematographic disposition, Robert Musil's Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (1906), and then to the programmatic psychoanalytic film, G. W. Pabst's Geheimnisse einer Seele (1926). In both cases, access to the secrets of the soul via an allegorical key is shown to be blocked, with curiosity left open at the end.

New wine in old bottles? The biotechnology problem in the history of molecular biology

This paper examines the “biotechnology problem” in the history of molecular biology, namely the alleged reinvention of a basic academic discipline looking for the logic of life, into a typical technoscientific enterprise, closely related to agriculture, medicine, and the construction of markets. The dominant STS model sees the roots of this shift in a radical change of the regime of knowledge production. The paper argues that this scheme needs to be historicized to take into account the past in our biotech present. Looking at the development of breast cancer genetic testing and GMOs as examples of mounting issues of intellectual property, risk and regulation, the paper also argues that historians of biology should pay closer attention to the political, the economical and the legal changes of the last thirty years. Solving the biotech problem requires new categories. The notion of “way of regulating” is given as an example of such notions linking the local and the global.

Between Expertise and Biomedicine: Public Health Research in France after the Second World War

Between Expertise and Biomedicine: Public Health Research in France after the Second World War

Science parks as knowledge organizations – the “ba” in action?

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to contribute to the understanding of the failure of science parks to become a central actor in the knowledge economy and, with the help of new organizational theory, to propose new solutions.Design/methodology/approachThe paper reviews a number of recent studies of science parks and their effect on innovation and economic growth, measured by revenue or survival rate of new firms, but demonstrating no positive result of the parks. The paper then introduces modern organization theory, specializing in analyzing the processes of creating, managing, organizing, and transferring knowledge distributed through a number of networks and other volatile organizations in order to investigate the set‐up of science parks in the knowledge economy.FindingsUsing Nonaka's concept of ba as a metaphor for the new tradition in organizational theory, the paper finds very few – if any – signs of these new ways of organizing in traditional science parks. The paper argues that principles from modern knowledge organizations has to be installed in science parks if the parks are to regain the initiative and become an important actor in the new regime of knowledge production. Otherwise, science parks must be viewed as an outdated institution, left over from the industrial society.Practical implicationsThe paper proposes a system of certification and quality assessment that might speed up the change in science parks from organizations formed by the industrial society to organizations serving the needs of the knowledge society.Originality/valueThe paper is an original contribution to the theory of science parks and innovation policy. The use of new organizational theory on knowledge management, illustrated by Nonaka's concept of ba, presents a new solution to overcome the traditional thinking on how to organize science parks.

The daguerreotype’s first frame: François Arago’s moral economy of instruments

This paper examines the meanings of the daguerreotype for the astronomer and physicist who introduced it to the world, François Arago. The regime of knowledge production which held sway at the birth of photography implied an alternative view of the moral and political implications of machines from that usually suggested by discussions of ‘mechanization’. Instead of celebrating detachment, instantaneity, transparency and abstraction, Arago understood instruments and human citizens as dynamic mediators which necessarily modify the forces they transmit. His moral economy of instruments also implied specific aesthetic and political commitments. Arago’s republican convictions and expressive personal style, as well as his identification with revolutionary scientist–statesmen including Lazare Carnot and Condorcet, present a strong contrast with the imperial science of Laplace and the image of disengaged, impersonal ‘mechanism’ often associated with the physical science of this time.

Institutional Transformations in the Regime of Knowledge Production: The University as a catalyst for the Science-Based Knowledge Economy

AbstractAlthough, the process of the capitalization of academic scientific knowledge is not benign across university campuses, recent acceleration of the process have sparked debates in many circles. This debate mirrors two sets of issues-public versus private interests. While the discourse has shed some light on the socio-economic and political forces at work, it is not devoid of problems. The paper argues that the understanding of the university as a catalyst for the science-based knowledge economy should be built around the framework that the university like industry and government is responding to a wide range of socio-economic and political demands that cannot be delinked from each other. It contends that, in a period of an ever-increasing demand for science and technology, universities' as citadels of knowledge have through the capitalization of academic scientific knowledge become a catalyst for the science-based knowledge economy.

Regimes of Knowledge Production in Society: Towards a More Political and Social Reading

The `co-productions' of science and society have undergone dramatic changes in recent decades. However, contrasts between `Mode 1' and `Mode 2' are not compelling inhistorical terms. This essay will argue that, in fact, they offer too naturalistic and a-political a picture.

Emergence of a Triple Helix of university—industry—government relations

At a workshop in Amsterdam in January 1996, the Triple Helix of university-industry-government relations was discussed with a focus on the future of university research in the emerging regime of knowledge production and dissemination. The helices are hypothesized as selection mechanisms; the distributed events can then be considered as the outcomes of interactions between these underlying dynamics. A focus is suggested on communicative interactions and reflexive mechanisms thus extending the analytical framework, so that the study of the knowledge infrastructure of society can be endogenized into the model of evolutionary economics. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.