Knowledge Regimes Research Articles

Exploring Interdisciplinarity and Transdisciplinarity as Knowledge Regimes: A Heuristic Tool for Disentangling Understandings in Academia and Policy

This paper presents a heuristic tool aiming at bringing the multiple dimensions of interdisciplinarity (ID) and transdisciplinarity (TD) into direct conversation for researchers, funders, and policymakers. These societal actors have divergent conceptions, definitions, and practices of ID and TD that can be fruitfully put into dialogue to prosecute successful projects and programs. We anchor our study on the concept of “knowledge regime” and its three components (ideologies and myths, shared beliefs and practices, and imaginaries and values) to develop a comprehensive view of the heterogeneous understandings of ID and TD that goes beyond the cognitive dimension. Founded on a qualitative methodology, we designed a heuristic tool to disentangle this heterogeneity and bridge the different understandings in a comparable way. Through a semi-structured dialogue, users of the tool discuss ten questions that guide reflections on understandings of ID and TD used in projects, funding programs, and policy processes and their implications to reveal differences and increase mutual understanding. The findings offer details on the tool and systematize insights from those users who tested it in different contexts. We conclude by discussing the contribution this heuristic tool makes when considering ID and TD as knowledge regimes in the scientific and policy domains.

Rice and its Multiple Identities: A Discursive Study of Paddy Cultivation in Nepal and Himalaya

This paper encounters the problem of the identity of rice and paddy farmers in Nepal and in the Himalayan region. It examines discursive practices in three different regimes of knowledge that constitute rice and paddy cultivation in Nepal and the Himalayas; mythological, socio-cultural, and Techno-political. For the analysis, it has brought descriptions of materials from the comprehensive compendium on ‘Rice Sciences and Technology in Nepal’, (2017). The compendium is the major source of materials or ‘corpus of the statement’ in relation to each of the domains of knowledge in paddy cultivation for analysis. The analysis exposes the meanings and identities of rice and paddy farmers and farmers’ positions in each of the regimes. This paper argues that the contemporary discourse of rice/paddy cultivation is dominated by the techno-political regime of knowledge which has specific implications for the production of the identity of rice and paddy farmers. Furthermore, this mediation reproduces rice as a commodity to sell in the open market and paddy farmers as the passive recipients of the information and skills from the modern agriculture agencies like the state, scientists, media, and agro-companies. It utilizes Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (FDA) method while approaching the different domains of knowledge. The argument is based on the ‘non-essentialist’ theory within the anthropological framework of political ecology as proposed by a senior post-modern anthropologist Arturo Escobar.

Depicting reflections of power on illocutionary acts of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzō Abe’s speeches on Covid-19

Speeches are often construed to exert one’s power while projecting a political intent towards the audience. This research examines how power is reflected in speeches by Shinzō Abe, a former Prime Minister of Japan, through the categorisation of speech acts. The speeches were delivered in many of his press conferences during the Covid-19 pandemic. The research employed a quantitative approach, and the analysis largely drew on Searle's classification of speech acts to identify and categorise Mr Abe’s expressions of power. Data for this study focused on various formal press briefings, interviews, or other communicative exchanges he conducted in his role as a prime minister. Eight texts were selected for the analysis, and they were collected from the website of the Japanese Prime Minister's Secretariat office from February to May 2020. Findings from the analysis indicated that the prime minister mostly utilised performative verb utterance directions, such as informing (66%), asking (78%), promising (90%), thanking (54%), and deciding (76%), in a form of polite and respectful language, Keigo, to demonstrate reverence towards diplomatic entities. In addition, he frequently highlighted statistical data regarding the circumstances and the prevailing factors of the pandemic that led to a regime of truth and knowledge about Covid-19 in Japan. The findings provided better understanding of Shinzō Abe’s exercise of authority in managing the variability of Covid-19 incidences in Japan, as reflected in the movement of relations with the society and with those diplomatic entities. This suggests that Shinzo Abe’s speeches during the pandemic have a potential pathway that world leaders, linguists or students can traverse and inquire into to ensure community resilience to counteract the fragility caused by a pandemic.

Wind Energy on Trial in Saepmie: Epistemic Controversies and Strategic Ignorance in Norway’s Green Energy Transition

Climate change policies and the green energy transition have renewed colonial structures and injustices for Indigenous peoples in land-use conflicts, but not without resistance. This article explores epistemic controversies in a legal struggle concerning impacts from wind energy infrastructure on Southern Saami reindeer herding and culture in Norway. The article draws on courtroom ethnography and diverse written material concerning a court case between the wind energy company Fosen Vind DA and the Southern Saami reindeer herders in Fovsen Njaarke Sïjte. The findings show that the parties’ competing claims to truth rely on different knowledge systems and worldviews concerning what Southern Saami reindeer herding is an ought to be. However, beyond onto-epistemological struggles between the “Indigenous” and the “Western”, Fosen Vind DA and the Norwegian state strategically ignored all knowledges that threatened capitalist and green colonial interests. The Fosen case illustrates how Indigenous peoples can contest dominant knowledge regimes and colonial presumptions about their livelihoods, culture, and rights through the legal system. However, the Norwegian state’s reluctancy to respect the outcome of the Supreme Court verdict reveals that asymmetric power relations continue to pave the way for colonial dispossession of Saami landscapes, epistemes, and human rights in the green energy transition.

Decolonising EU Trade Relations with the Global Souths?

That the European Union’s common commercial relations with ex-colonies and more broadly the ‘tiers monde’ now rest variously on benevolence, depoliticised practices, equal partnerships and values fuels reigning foundational myths about the EU in global politics. Efforts to disrupt these received presuppositions have come from interpretivist, postcolonial, post-development, post-structuralist and other heterodox research traditions. Yet the academy has been largely impervious to knowledges that genuinely question and subvert, in both theory and praxis, Eurocentric ways of seeing the world and understanding the EU as a ‘benevolent’ trade actor on the world stage. In dialogue with existing heterodox approaches, this article asks how we might puncture the coloniality of dominant knowledge regimes about EU trade relations vis-à-vis the global souths, i.e., peoples and places that the EU deems peripheral and, as such, in need of trade-related interventions in the name of development. To this end, we propose different ‘subject-positions’ with which to unthink and rethink our ways of knowing EU trade policy and the Eurocentrism lurking behind it by turning to decolonial thought. We borrow heavily from the work of Meera Sabaratnam whose ‘decolonising strategies’ in studying world politics we attempt to exemplify through a critical interrogation of the canonical scholarship around three distinct ‘policy worlds’ of EU external trade relations: Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) and Trade and Sustainable Development (TSD) chapters in free trade agreements. Finally, we think reflexively about the decolonial option and the ruptures it triggers as to what EU trade policy is and the colonial logics sustaining ‘normative’ and ‘geopolitical’ narratives on/by the EU as a trade power.

The rhetoric of return: Mingma or the contradictions of development in Nepal*

Leaving for the city or going abroad to study, to later return and contribute to the development of the village. This notion is what we propose here as the rhetoric of return, a polysemic concept that is central to the narrative of development and education in Nepal. The migratory trajectory of Mingma, a young Sherpa who grew up in Sikkim (India), questions this notion based on her experience of returning to Gaun (Nepal), her family’s village. Her story allows us to understand the negotiations that stem from her ideals of development, her role as a teacher and her relationship with the villagers. The most important findings reveal the close link between mobility and knowledge regimes in Nepal and demonstrate the relevance of gender in the mobility-development nexus and its contradictions.

The vicious circle of policy advisory systems and knowledge regimes in consolidated authoritarian regimes

Abstract So far, interest in policy and political sciences has mostly centered around the varieties of policy advisory systems (PASs) and knowledge regimes in consolidated democracies rather than in consolidated autocracies, which largely remain as black boxes. Drawing on a hybrid literature review, this article aims to fill this gap. It reviews selected articles published between 1992 and February 2023 in the Thomson Reuters Web of Knowledge Social Science Citation Index database to not only to reveal the current state of empirical and theoretical knowledge and persistent knowledge gaps but also to offer an integration of the literature that leads to a preliminary conceptual framework in this emerging topic. In doing so, it contributes to the body of knowledge on this topic in three main ways. First, it provides a comprehensive review of PASs in consolidated autocracies to identify the central features of policy knowledge production within and across autocracies. Second, it proposes “the vicious circle of authoritarian PAS and knowledge regime” as a conceptual approach. In doing so, it takes a modest step toward a holistic conceptualization and synthesis of this literature to date. Third, it establishes connections between fragmented literature studies; identifies theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological gaps; and proposes suggestions concerning promising paths for future research.

Hydroponic Capital: Socionatural Innovation and the Intensification of Glasshouse Agrifood Production

This article develops the concept of hydroponic capital in order to explain the emergence of socionatural innovations aiming to enhance food security and production efficiencies in glasshouse agrifood production clusters. It does so through an archaeology of the knowledge regimes involved in technology innovations and examines the regionalized and transnational networks of crop scientists, growers, and extension workers involved. How hydroponics resulted in an intensification of the circulation time for capital and a reduction in the scale and costs of labor inputs is explained. In doing so, advances in economic geographic understanding of innovation through an engagement with agrarian political economy and political ecological debates to explain how hydroponic capital developed through the combination of different innovatory knowledges seeking to grapple with plant pathologies and cropping systems across regionalized networks of actors are discussed. Hydroponics was a way for growers to overcome biophysical barriers to production and labor rationalization problems. The article combines an understanding of the dynamics of labor and capital in agrarian systems, since they struggle with crop biophysicality, with the granular processes of knowledge deployment by which innovation takes place to overcome these biophysical barriers in agrifood supply chains. Unlike much existing innovation research focusing on the combination of different knowledge bases, why different forms of innovation knowledge were combined to overcome biophysical barriers in agrifood innovation is explained.

The rise and fall of ordoliberalism

Ordoliberalism has been accused of being the ideational blueprint for Germany’s fiscal stance during the Eurozone-crisis. While the literature that debates the influence of ordoliberalism on crisis politics is growing, there is a lack of studies tracing the ordoliberal influence within Germany. This study shows that ordoliberalism had very limited influence on the creation of German institutions and its economic knowledge regime. Where ordoliberalism can be found is in the bureaucracy. This influence will come to an end with the last ordoliberals retiring. The article reconstructs how the reorientation of German economics towards the global economics profession crowded out ordoliberalism. Ordoliberalism, publishing mostly in German and not being able to formalize its theory, could not keep up with modern German economics. This will also dry up the supply of ordoliberal staff for the bureaucracy. The article shows also that ordoliberalism lives on as part of the German conservative political tradition.

Gregory Afinogenov. Spies and Scholars: Chinese Secrets and Imperial Russia’s Quest for World Power.

Gregory Afinogenov’s Spies and Scholars is a study of Russian-Qing relations in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and first half of the nineteenth century and, at the same time, an examination of shifting knowledge regimes and the implications of those shifts. With a lively narrative style and accessible language, it offers an original take on the history of relations between Russian and Qing empires. It decenters the standard bipartite diplomatic story by focusing, on the one hand, the unremarked middlemen who held the key to the successes and failures of those interactions, and on the other, the broad international arena in which relations were negotiated. It offers a sophisticated consideration of the meanings of knowledge regimes and reimagines the relationship between knowledge and power. This is quite a feat. On top of that, Afinogenov uses the stories of a sequence of astounding swindlers, rogues, and grifters to propel the grand history of diplomatic, commercial, intellectual, religious, and ideological interactions forward. And all this in an engrossing, readable book.

Inclusion of IMF in Eurozone Crisis Management: Legitimacy Through External Expertise and Internal Depoliticisation

ABSTRACT A new technocratic knowledge regime emerged in Europe in 2010. Known as the Troika, it included the European Commission, the European Central Bank, and the IMF. The Greek Stand-By Arrangement was the IMF’s first Eurozone financial assistance involvement, controversial for both the EU and the IMF. We trace how the IMF entered the process, focusing on why EU institutions involved it. We used official documents, statements, and a unique set of 129 interviews with IMF and EU decision-makers and Member State officials. We argue that the EU sought the IMF’s expertise in loan and conditionality negotiation, public image credibility, perceived guarantee for austerity, and depoliticisation. They were internally motivated by lack of confidence in the European Commission among EU Member States. Legitimacy was sought externally through the IMF’s expertise. The IMF continued its previous depoliticising role, a crucial strategy in crisis management, now in a novel multilevel context.

Stygofaunal Worlds

Abstract How can we cultivate an underground multispecies justice with beings whose lifeworlds are unknown and unknowable? This article examines this question through a consideration of stygofauna: miniscule deep-time creatures who make their home in the watery seams of the earth. Taking a cue from these critters—many of whom have evolved without eyes to make their way differently in the darkness of their watery subterranean homes—the article troubles the assumption that knowledge, care, and justice must be predicated on a kind of knowing that insists that humans literally bring other worlds to light. Through a specifically situated exploration of stygofaunal worlds, knowledge, and mining in Australia, the article asks, How is knowledge-as-illumination complicit with complex regimes of knowledge where knowing in the name of justice is tangled up in knowing as a further (colonial, speciesist, ableist) violence? Refusing purity politics, the article's first aim is to demonstrate our complicity with extractive knowledge regimes even in a quest to care for underground worlds. Second, the article insists that knowing otherwise is both possible and already at work. It argues that to know stygofauna otherwise, one cannot eschew science or knowledge altogether. Instead, it proposes that multispecies justice depends on two moves: first, on safeguarding a mode of unknowability that the article refers to as estrangement, and second, on recognizing and cultivating knowledge practices that can cultivate nonextractive relations with subterranean species, even if imperfectly. It concludes with a short overview of several examples of knowing otherwise that push readers to think differently about knowledge as a practice of care and justice.

Scientification of Norwegian football in the 1990s and the emergence of a new regime of knowledge

ABSTRACT The present paper aims to analyse the importance of science in Norwegian men’s football’s successful period in the 1990s. A main purpose is to examine how the ideas of Egil ‘Drillo’ Olsen (coach of the men’s national team) and Nils Arne Eggen (Rosenborg BK) were part of a general trend of scientification of Norwegian elite sport at the time. By Norwegian standards, both the national team and Rosenborg achieved good results and made their mark internationally. We investigate how Drillo and Eggen not only improved sporting results, but also educated Norwegian football opinion. Their mission was mainly to optimize football performance based on scientific approaches in either football tactics isolated (Drillo) or in combination with more pedagogical and psychological theories of teamwork and interaction (Eggen). We discuss how their modern approach to science at that particular time and that particular stage of football’s development, and the regime of knowledge on which they built, created a competitive advantage to the rest of the world. After 2000, the rest of the world closed the gap, and the achievements of Norwegian football declined.

Determinants of union strategies towards the twin digital and green transitions in the German and Belgian automotive industry

This article examines union strategies towards the twin digital and green transitions, comparing the German and Belgian automotive industries. The drive towards net-zero and more digital economies is manifested through the move from fossil fuel-powered cars to electric cars, engendering a reorganisation of production, work and employment among car manufacturers. We identified two strategic union response patterns. While German unions are developing proactive strategies and proposals to influence and shape the ongoing transition of the automotive industry, Belgian unions are more passive, reacting primarily to management proposals and focusing narrowly on employment and working conditions without a broader strategy on how to influence the transformation of the automotive industry. We explain the observed cross-national differences by two factors: the importance of national institutions, i.e., the varying integration of labour into management decision-making, and the role of union knowledge regimes. The latter refers to internal union organisations and structures such as research departments, research institutes and foundations tasked with providing own research and funding external research on change topics from a union perspective, publishing studies and developing programmatic agendas, and disseminating the knowledge to union members through training, workshops and conferences.

Human-Animal Relations and Livestock Disease Management in Postcolonial Zimbabwe, c.1980 to 2022

Abstract The history of livestock disease management strategies in colonial Zimbabwe has generally revealed uneven and racialised access to conventional veterinary facilities that favoured white- over black-owned livestock. In light of this context, this article examines the human-animal relationships that emerged in post-colonial Zimbabwe when access to such facilities was liberalised in a new era in which communal livestock owners still had broken interrelations with the state. In articulating this, it also explores factors that precluded communal livestock farmers from raising 'healthy' livestock. Using qualitative methods, it discusses how the postcolonial state failed to provide robust state veterinary services, and demonstrates communal farmers' agency amidst loss to epizootics and enzootics. As this study will show, livestock diseases and the challenges they posed significantly impacted on how humans (communal farmers) determined which animals to raise and how to raise them. It concludes that livestock diseases and the human-animal relationships that emerged out of the quandary posed by the former, had a negative impact on state-communal livestock farmer relationships, and promoted the continued relevance of otherwise officially despised livestock knowledge regimes in Zimbabwe's communal areas.

Internationalization as myth, ceremony and doxa in higher education. The case of the Nordic countries between centre and periphery

ABSTRACT The article deals with the validation of the internationalization imperative in higher education institutions (HEIs) of the Nordic countries. I focus on both the goals and motives behind activities supporting internationalization, but also on the manner of their habitualization and institutionalization in the practice of academic administration and organizational management. The issue of legitimization of institutional changes is addressed by means of the rationalized myths that create durable dispositions for specific practices, changes in procedures and attitudes in a given socio-political setting. I draw on empirical examples that include practical solutions and strategies developed under the conditions of semiperipheral positionality of the Nordic states. This perspective makes their internationalization policies an interesting frame of reference for other countries and the paper concludes by pointing to the latest trends that can serve either as an inspiration or a warning for other states. The Nordic countries offer an example of how institutionalizing the ‘strategic gains’ narrative from globalization may lead to a recalibration of an earlier knowledge regime along with attempts to change centre-periphery relations, including the reframing of priorities and rationalities of different stakeholders in higher education.

Sir Robert Cotton, Manuscript Pamphleteering, and the Making of Jacobean Kingship during the Short Peace, ca. 1609–1613

AbstractThis article concerns two manuscript tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, the Answer to Certain Military Men regarding Foreign War (1609) and Twenty-Four Arguments on the Strict Execution of the Laws against Seminary Priests (1613). To the limited extent that these tracts have been studied at all, historians have read them as artifacts of the Jacobean regime's internal counseling process. Through analysis of the both the structure of the Jacobean regime's knowledge economy and the two tracts and contextualizing them, the author argues that these were, instead, innovative exercises in publicity, designed to defend existing Jacobean policy against so-called country criticism. Designed to circulate widely among the kingdom's social elite—indeed, more than two dozen handwritten copies of each tract survive—the manuscript pamphlets played on Cotton's reputation as an antiquary to legitimize the Jacobean regime's most controversial policies. More broadly, the tracts demonstrate the dilemma of a Jacobean regime caught between the geopolitics of peace and interconfessional diplomacy and the expectations of a domestic political elite nurtured on the values and expectations of confessional war.

‘This Corresponds with the Study’

In this paper, we elaborate on the role of scientific knowledge for the development of municipal urban development strategies in the East German cities of Schwerin and Halle (Saale). We will focus on the topic of segregation that has increasingly become an issue with regard to large housing estates, which have recently experienced growing numbers of immigrants. Using the concept of knowledge regimes we analyse, how the scientific debate on segregation is introduced in the administrative discourse, and which changes it provokes in municipal strategies and practices. Our analysis points to the importance of local political contexts, which are crucial for whether and how segregation and migration are problematised. Furthermore, it reveals that despite the different visibility of the topic, comparable policies have been developed in both cities.

Thinking from the Barrio: Location, Modernity, and the Popular in Alejandro Moreno

This article examines and criticizes the question of the slum and some of its contemporary approaches in order to propose another way of framing such a question, one that emerges from the slum itself as an experience of conceiving and living in the world in a way that challenges the Modern Episteme, that is, the regime of knowledge of the West par excellence. In the case of Venezuela, as seen in the work of Alejandro Moreno, this challenge is articulated by what he calls the Popular Episteme, driven by a set of historical practices and knowledge that complicates any generalizing and dependency-driven conceptions of the slum or the barrio, to be more precise within the Venezuelan context. This thought from the barrio, that Moreno’s work helps us articulate, becomes a way of going beyond conceptions of the slum as the other side of modernity, as if trapped in a totalizing dialectic; but it also helps us take some critical ways of studying the slum to the limit and offer a view from the Venezuelan barrio as a way of illuminating the heterogeneous experience of all the sites that have been globally labeled as “slums” and the need to connect them through their difference and not because the subjectivities they harbor are equivalent. The reflection about the location from which thought departs, and Moreno’s work as an example of this, will be the crucial element and the guiding thread of this reflection.

IMF expertise in the eurozone crisis: from stimulus talk to austerity policy

The eurozone crisis presented the opportunity to reform European economic policies. In spring 2010, a new technocratic knowledge regime developed in the form of the Troika that consisted of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This article provides new, previously understudied, knowledge on the internal dynamics of the Troika. As the prevailing austerity paradigm had been questioned during the preceding years also within the IMF, this study analyses the role of IMF’s expertise during the negotiations that led to the first Greek loan package and created a path-dependent crisis management scheme. It traces how the IMF acted as a source of expertise and its role in the persistence of the austerity paradigm. The analysis is based on a unique set of interviews with decision-makers. The IMF’s role in the negotiations was very important, but unexpectedly the Commission ruled on most of the content. In contrast to some earlier research, this analysis argues that even if the IMF had become more open to new economic-policy ideas, it did not truly challenge the European austerity policy. Reasons for this include the perceived lack of fiscal space, constraints from the EU, pessimism towards Greek growth, and the gap between research and policy departments of the IMF. This partly explains why the crisis did not lead to a change in eurozone policies. The analysis contributes also to identifying intra-institutional autonomy and fragmentation as reasons for the stability of economic paradigms despite apparent challenges even within hegemonic institutions such as the IMF.