Knowledge Production Research Articles

Research ethics in social science research during health pandemics: what can we learn from COVID-19 experiences?

The COVID-19 pandemic posed many ethical and practical challenges for academic research. Some of these have been documented, particularly in relation to health research, but less attention has been paid to the dilemmas encountered by educational and social science research. Given that pandemics are predicted to be more frequent, it is vital to understand how to continue crucial research in schools and other learning communities. This article therefore focuses specifically on research ethics in educational and social science during the pandemic of 2020–2022. The research involved interviews and workshops with University College London (UCL) academics, professional staff and graduate students and encompassed those involved in reviewing ethics applications, researchers dealing with ethics in projects that continued despite disruptions caused by COVID-19, and successful research projects specifically designed to study the effects of COVID-19 in various contexts. The article discusses some of the crucial knowledge and practical experiences that were accumulated. The operational and epistemological lessons learned from this particular institution may have wider relevance to research ethics processes in higher education environments where academics and students are grappling with post-COVID-19 ethical dilemmas and inform broader debates about how research institutions can build institutional knowledge to improve practices of ethics review at the times of health emergencies in future. Our evidence points to the significance of inter- and multidisciplinary, collaborative approaches that flatten institutional hierarchies and to the crucial role played by professional staff. In addition, we argue that ethics review processes must be underpinned by critical debates about wider issues of unequal power relationships between research partners, the nature of knowledge production, ownership and utilisation. To enhance equity and epistemic justice in research practices, ethics education should be an ongoing integral part of research ethics within research institutions.

Queer theory impossible

ABSTRACT This essay examines the institutional construction of “queer theory” as a field in the United States and its translation and subsequent failure outside the U.S. Despite presenting itself as a critical field of inquiry, queer theory has been centered in the most privileged institutions in the global North, primarily in the U.S. I investigate how U.S.-centric queer theory has built upon the international division between “theory” and “case,” rooted in colonial science and knowledge production, particularly in relation to sexuality and race. To address these issues, I analyze the controversy surrounding the publication and translation of the edited volume, Queer Korea, from Duke University Press’s acclaimed Perverse Modernities series, focusing on research ethics and hegemonic whiteness. I argue that this controversy demonstrates how contemporary U.S.-centric queer theory appropriates and capitalizes on the language of “decentering,” “provincializing,” or “decolonizing” at the expense of marginalized queer lives, struggles, and knowledge outside the U.S.

Empowerment or alienation? Teaching gender and development in postcolonial contexts

ABSTRACT This paper explores how culture, religion, gender, and the politics of knowledge production were entangled in the mission, policies, and practices of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh. The article contributes to documenting how decolonisation efforts in women’s education and empowerment play out in an institution located in the periphery and established with an explicit mission for women’s empowerment. The article critically looks at the (sometimes) contradictory discourses, desires, and agencies at the student, community, staff, and institutional levels, along with the power dynamics and reproduction of colonial and postcolonial practices and legacies in the context of operationalising gender and development (GAD), highlighting the paradoxes and challenges that arise from such endeavours. Finally, this case study highlights how pedagogies of community building at the institutional level become integral in responding to such tensions and conflicts and in countering the alienation from culture and religion that global practices of GAD often create.

Transformative learning at the community-university-land interface: A political ecology of knowledge, education and health

As awareness grows of the catastrophic implications of global environmental change, multiple scholarly fields addressing health-environment relationships have advocated 'transformative' educational strategies. Holistic Indigenous health-environment models inspire and inform many such efforts, but related land-based learning initiatives involving universities are often impeded by the competitive processes of academia. In this article we report on a community-university partnership – Pedagogy for the Anthropocene (P4A) – aimed at developing transformative educational responses to pressing global crises, inspired by land-based approaches. We integrate political ecologies of health, education, and knowledge to understand the troubled production of pedagogical knowledge in P4A, participant experiences in the resulting educational programs and the role of health and bodies in both. We first trace the production of knowledge as shaped by macroscopic and localized institutional forces; organizational and occupational dynamics; interacting knowledges and individuals; and material factors. Next, we explore participant experiences in the resulting educational programming. In both steps, affect-laden bodies of academics, trainees and community members reveal entanglements with human communities and more-than-human elements, shaped in variable ways by institutional forces such as settler colonialism and university neoliberalization. One key finding involves the role of universities in relation to land dispossession at home and abroad; another includes the challenges of pursuing transformational community-university research within contemporary universities. Tracing such entanglements yields implications for future land-based learning efforts in university settings, and broader praxis for environmental justice in the shadow of higher education's complicity with settler colonialism and globally extractive neoliberal capitalism.

Mapping Higher Education Internationalisation as a Research Space via Natural Language Processing (NLP) Techniques

The productivity of a specific research field hinges on the periodic examination of both the knowledge produced and the knowledge production activities. By harnessing the strength of traditional bibliometric analyses and a variety of Natural language processing (NLP) techniques, this study portrayed a holistic landscape of higher education internationalisation (HEI) research that incorporated time and region through a spatial lens. The findings reveal the field's evolution into establishment, significant regional variations in research focus, and the expansion of networks for disseminating knowledge. These factors collectively contribute to a diverse ‘lived’ space of HEI research. However, the dominance of Western-centric key concepts, theories, and discourses highlights a homogenous ‘conceived’ space, pointing to an underlying tension between these spaces. Despite these challenges, opportunities for breakthroughs exist. Additionally, the study underscores the immense potential of NLP techniques in facilitating the exploration of how research fields evolve, further enriching our understanding of HEI.

Knowledge production at a crossroads: rising antidemocracy and diminishing academic freedom

ABSTRACT This essay links the global shift toward antidemocracy with the global attack on higher education. I argue that rising far-right politics in many countries is also politicizing higher education, in turn diminishing the freedom to research, think and teach. This is apparent across Europe, the Americas, Middle East, Asia, Africa and among supposedly leading liberal democracies such as the United States. A common strategy in far-right attacks on higher education has been to limit scholars’ claim to collective institutional autonomy and reduce scholarly conversation to an individual’s right to free speech. The new UK Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 illustrates this reductionism explicitly. To counter this trend, I argue for reframing academic freedom as social responsibility to wider societies, underscoring its collective dimensions and legibility and applicability to nonacademic audiences. This reframing is particularly important in global north countries given the dominance of the Euro-American academy in knowledge production, and the relative power of western scholars to push back against intellectual censorship. Drawing on the recent wave of political activism across social movements and union mobilization in the United States, I argue this presents an opportunity for connecting the defense of higher education with the defense of wider concerns around issues such as the climate crisis, labor conditions, anti-racism, conflict and abortion rights. I conclude that shifting the narrative about academic freedom is essential for building transnational support across class, race, ethnic, religious, gender and educational differences, and resisting escalating attacks on universities and colleges around the world.

Problém reflexivity

This article presents reflexivity in its various meanings and forms as it appears in anthropology and social sciences. During the second half of the twentieth century in these fields, it became both an inspiration for various theories of the functioning of social phenomena, but also a part of anthropological methodology: in the era of the reflexive turn, it served as a critique of the situatedness of the production of anthropological knowledge, which was supposed to unmask the personal influence of the researcher on the resulting form of the texts. Although the contribution of this stage to the understanding of the meaning of the textuality of anthropological works cannot be denied, I see its “normalization” as part of anthropological methodology as problematic. If we focus more closely on the functioning mechanisms of reflexivity and self-reflection, we will come across certain paradoxes. In this paper, I focus on various criticisms of reflexivity, through which I try to approach the essence of the problem of using reflexivity. Emphasis is placed on the debate on reflexivity as a pivotal mechanism in the organization of late modern societies as described by theorists such as Giddens, Beck, Lash or Archer. These theories are confronted with the concept of “speech” as understood by constructivist approaches such as discourse analysis, which view all meanings as variable and constantly constructed by linguistic means in ordinary speech. I further show how reflexivity is unmasked by the opponents of reflexive modernization theory as a rhetorical strategy used to legitimize the status quo. This example serves as an illustration of the illusory nature of reflexivity and the possibility of its misuse.

Overlooking nature: the Arctic, climate change, and environmental diplomacy in the study of Canadian foreign policy

ABSTRACT This article examines three prominent concepts in post-Cold War foreign policy in Canada: the Arctic, climate change, and environmental diplomacy. We study the prevalence of articles on these topics in the wider field of Canadian foreign policy studies, who is responsible for their production, and how they relate to each other and to the broader field of Canadian foreign policy studies. Through a quantitative analysis of these concepts in six academic journals between 1989 and 2022, we find that contrary to their importance to Canadian foreign policy practice during that time, the Arctic, climate change, and environmental diplomacy are: (1) marginal to mainstream scholarship on Canadian foreign and security policy; (2) conceptually closely linked together; and (3) shaped by the knowledge production of a relatively small epistemic community of scholars. We outline the methodology of our literature review for the Arctic, climate change, and environmental diplomacy within Canadian foreign policy scholarship, present our findings, and discuss their significance for understanding these topics within the broader field of Canadian foreign policy studies.

Who Authors Social Science? Demographics and the Production of Knowledge

Author demographics are of key epistemic importance in science—shaping the approaches to and contents of research—especially in social scientific knowledge production, yet we know very little about who produces social scientific publications. We fielded an original demographic survey of nearly 20,000 sociology, economics, and communication authors in the Web of Science from 2016–2020. Our results include not only details about gender and race/ethnicity but also the first descriptive statistics on social science authors’ sexuality, disability, parental education, and employment characteristics. We find authorship in the social sciences looks very different from other measures of disciplinary membership like who holds PhDs or faculty positions. For example, half of the authors in each discipline’s journals say that they are not a member of the discipline in which they published. Moreover, social science authors are considerably less diverse than other measures of disciplinary membership. In sociology, women constitute a majority of PhDs, faculty, and American Sociological Association members; by contrast, men make up a majority of sociology’s authors. Additionally, we include a wide array of descriptive statistics across a range of demographic characteristics, which will be of interest to inequality scholars, science scholars, and social scientists engaged in diversifying their disciplines.

Digital images generated by Artificial Intelligence as ethnographic experimentation

The article discusses the role of images produced by artificial intelligence (AI) in visual anthropology,  highlighting their ability to represent identity and  experience. It also addresses the technical and  ethical challenges of AI data classification and its  interaction with socio-technical networks, questioning technological neutrality. Technical implications include  data categorization that can perpetuate biases and  power relations. The simplification and distortion of representations by AI is highlighted, requiring a critical  analysis of the stories embedded in the categorizations. It is proposed that anthropologists examine the relationship between image, label, and referent, recognizing differences and similarities in their roles and those of AI labelers in knowledge production. In addition, it discusses how AI images can influence anthropological interpretation and analysis by blending reality and emotion. It is argued that a critical engagement with the ethical and technical implications of the generation and use of these images is necessary. 

Sonoridades fronteiriças: fruição e rearticulações da música pop e da música popular

This study evaluated empirical data from musical listening workshops to analyze the communicational aspects of hybrid musical productions by artists from the global South. The discourse of workshop participants open a premise to consider the mixture of rhythms, instrumentation, timbres, and bodies as the production of situated knowledge about different cultures. Thus, the activities in the workshops represent other community dynamics and new ways of populating the experience of musical fruition. Nomadism (Deleuze and Guattari) and cultural frontiers (Lotman) were used as theoretical concepts to understand the production of some artists and the shared enjoyment of their works in the workshops. This study aimed to analyze how this communicational experience can rearticulate subjectivities in a sense of alterity considering Latin American and decolonial perspectives.

Creative translation pathways for exploring gendered violence against Brazilian migrant women through a feminist translocational lens

ABSTRACT This paper explores how research on gendered violence among Brazilian migrant women in London has been translated through a range of creative engagements. It argues that these can challenge traditional forms of knowledge production, and advance intersectional feminist struggles through a logic of translocation. Yet it also challenges homogenous artistic encounters through developing ‘creative translation pathways’ which delineate different configurations of how researchers, artists, and participants using varied art forms . The paper focuses on two ‘creative translation pathways’ that capture different interpretative framings around the same research project. The first reflects a curatorial perspective through Gaël Le Cornec’s verbatim theatre play, Efêmera, which foregrounds her interpretation of Brazilian women’s stories adding a metatheatrical dimension to strengthen the narrative and connection with the audience. The second is a co-produced collaborative engagement, We Still Fight in the Dark, with community drama group, Migrants in Action, based around experimental workshops to produce an audio-visual film and installation where survivors’ perspectives and well-being are paramount. While both creative translation pathways reflected translocational feminist goals in raising awareness around gendered violence with a view to transform them, each had tensions around the individual, collective, artistic and therapeutic logics in the process of knowledge production.

Smart cities in developing countries: a review of research literature

ABSTRACT This paper departs from the need to better understand the intellectual map of smart city research in the context of developing countries which tends to be overlooked within the current smart city literature. A more refined landscape of smart city literature has been therefore carried out by using bibliometric analysis, i.e. a quantitative analysis method to measure and map the current body of knowledge in a scientific discipline, based on academic articles indexed in the Scopus database. In this paper, we employ a provincializing smart urbanism stance, particularly by looking through the lenses of socio-technical system and (variegated) development paths to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of smart cities. First, by looking at the research trends, geographical origins of knowledge production, research themes, and the overall intellectual structure of smart city research we unpack the similarities and differences between the general and developing countries categories. Second, reflecting upon these findings, we provide a more contextualized view of smart city research in developing countries and propose a number of research areas that have so far been overlooked. Given some peculiarities in the intellectual landscape of the smart city in developing countries due to different socio-technical contextual conditions, we suggest the need to attune the smart city label to national and local specifics so that it can aptly address real and multiplex urban challenges.

Sport for Development: A Social Movement Captured by Elites?

AbstractOver the last 30 years there has been a growth of actors involved in Sport for Development (SFD). Though some of these actors aligned with prevailing power structures, others challenged existing power structures. In that sense, the SFD movement became disparate and multi-faceted and could be seen as an emerging area that could challenge dominant structures. With time, the SFD sector has coalesced around a variety of formal structures, and these more ‘rebellious’ tendencies have been dampened. Though some have argued that these structures show adaptation or professionalisation, using Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s work as a foundation, I will argue that these changes emerged as part of a purposeful process of elite capture. In particular, elite capture has occurred in three interconnected ways. First, elite actors established standards, policies and guidelines that aligned with their interests. Second, elites imposed those standards by funding and controlling projects in the field. Finally, elites legitimised the standards they set by taking over avenues for knowledge production within SFD. Taken together, elite capture limits the ability of SFD actors to challenge the systemic factors that impede their participants and communities. To escape this, as Táíwò argues, means more than just offering representation to ‘marginalised’ groups. New structures outside of the constraints of existing ones are needed.

Can anthropologists get humor? A collaborative experiment on empathetic knowing at a time of predicaments

AbstractAs a pandemic‐era collaborative writing project undertaken amid rising geopolitical tensions, this article demonstrates understanding humor in contemporary China as an ethnographic project leading toward deep, empathetic knowledge at a time when in‐person fieldwork became difficult. Through deciphering and translating layered meanings “encrypted” in and intentions signaled by humor in a new comedy program launched in 2021, we dive deep into the lively social life in contemporary China. Humor, via “thick description,” offers valuable insights into life in “fieldsites” that were hard to access during the pandemic time, amid political tensions. It provides a unique lens to examine the unspoken but shared sentiments in societies where humor has become a fundamental mode of public expression. It alerts us to existential anxieties in social life, the subtle voices of social critique, and the yearning for empathy. Humor is not only a valuable object for anthropological inquiry but also a vantage point to reflect on ethnographic methodology and epistemology. We examine humor, with its sentimental and ethical potentialities, and through spontaneous collaboration of mutual support, envision new possibilities in anthropological knowledge production.

Multimodal Autoethnographic Sincerity

ABSTRACT Critically departing from theories of autoethnography, diaspora, and multimodality, this article introduces “multimodal autoethnographic sincerity,” which I define as a critical communication method that puts the researcher’s affective feelings in conversation with their mediated productions of culture. I use multimodal autoethnographic sincerity to further produce knowledge on an ethnographic film, which I filmed in my father’s provincial hometown Kalibo, Philippines. The new autoethnographic cultural critique I contribute to my film’s diasporic inquiries is a mapping of the festival’s transnational analysis against my affective feelings within my own Filipinx evolving body. I demonstrate the heuristic and generative capacities of a multimodal autoethnographic sincerity that makes multiple communication modes (diasporic body, homeland, cultural critique, filmmaking, and writing) in my knowledge production an ongoing intersubjective inquiry into the Philippines, colonialism, and the legacies of U.S. Empire. Ultimately, multimodal autoethnographic sincerity allows researchers to conceive of and methodologically examine diasporic identity as a relational process versus a racial and ethnic essentialism in today’s mobile condition of diasporic peoples.

Qualitative research during the COVID19 pandemic: the impact of remote research on the collaborative production of methodological knowledge

ABSTRACT During the COVID19 crisis, school closure was a frequent feature of Government responses. The Children’s School Lives (CSL) national cohort study of primary schooling in Ireland had to be adapted and transferred online as an interim response to the unprecedented impact that the pandemic had on the research environment. Adapting longitudinal qualitative research in response to a global pandemic brought specific challenges. In addition to moving data collection to remote methods, longitudinal studies also needed to maintain a focus on retention of research participants and sustain an analysis that informs the longitudinal design of the study. Based on reflective research practice during the COVID19 pandemic and through the collaborative production of methodological knowledge, this paper contributes to the literature on remote research during times of crisis. However, it also extends this literature as the methodological learning can be applied beyond the very particular circumstances of a pandemic.

Critical Reflections on Universities, Publishing, and the Early Career Experience

This paper is a critical reflection on the changing relationship between university institutions, academic publishing, and young researchers. It emerges from a current project in assessing the role and development of Warwick University’s research journals (and their editors), but also takes into account two recent Warwick Institute of Advanced Study seminars discussing the practical and strategic challenge of publishing for early career scholars and PhD students. While these seminars concerned publishing in general, and the question of career trajectories, this reflection paper takes into account the current shifts in publishing and our understanding of research as knowledge production more broadly. This reflection maintains that, in part provoked by digital media, the status of research knowledge vis-à-vis its traditional presentation in the discrete products of the ‘article’, and the book, has become unstable, and this instability has opened up a range of economic and systemic conditions of knowledge production that have long since been concealed. Current shifts thus offer younger scholars and early career researchers significant opportunities: this short paper sets out the initial framework for a current research project focussing on university publishing, then it refers to the two above seminars in order to conclude with some critical issues for academic practice, research and for early career scholars.

‘The Real Data Set’: A Case of Challenging Power Dynamics and Questioning the Boundaries of Research Production

While the co-production of knowledge through community-engaged research is intended to be a reciprocally beneficial process, academic institutions have often devalued community expertise by treating community organizations as subjects rather than co-creators of knowledge. Drawing from ethnographic work with a community-based organization (CBO), Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), this paper shows how one CBO is challenging and critiquing these long-standing power dynamics between community and their university partners. LA CAN centered community expertise and formed long-term mutual relationships based on shared values, primarily an abolitionist framework and connection to Black Radical Thought. Drawing from LA CAN’s partnerships and their definition of power, we discuss how shifting power dynamics and centering community expertise leads to a different form of knowledge production, resulting in “the real data set”. This case shows how CBOs are movement researchers who are central to creating and interpreting theory.

Patient-led research and displacements of biomedical knowledge production, distribution, and consumption.

Patient and Public Involvement in Research (PPIR) has become an increasingly prevalent and integral part of biomedical research. In this paper, we focus on patient-led research, taking as our case the construction of new biomedical knowledge regarding the rare disease ADNP syndrome. Specifically, we seek to understand how concepts of experiential knowledge and lay expertise become integral to rather than separate from scientific expertise. In the case of ADNP, the parent-led research "mimes" biomedical knowledge practices in a way that, on the one hand, enhances the legitimacy of science and scientific expertise, and on the other displaces and transforms science by the fact that other knowledge agents (patients, next-of-kin) enter these practices.