Means Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

ECOSYSTEM SERVICES AS THE OBJECT OF INTERDISCIPLINARY COLLABORATION

The concept of ecosystem services embodies an ideological framework, serves as a subject for fundamental research, provides methodological groundwork for applied projects, offers a practical approach to natural resource management, acts as a platform for international governmental and non-governmental collaboration, and serves as a means of knowledge production. The article presents the results of a systematic literature analysis focused on identifying key research trends in the field of ecosystem services that need further attention and development. It also highlights promising directions for transdisciplinary collaboration in the implementation and management of ecosystem services. Research methods involved iterative information retrieval, analysis of scientific papers, and review of contemporary methodological approaches. Based on the processed sources, seven comprehensive research directions of ecosystem services and twenty branches were identified. Ecosystem services are characterized as boundary objects. The main findings point to the need for integration of scientific disciplines, involvement of a wide range of stakeholders, and consolidation of development perspectives across various fields to achieve a compromise between ecosystem services utilization and conservation. The role of boundary organizations in achieving these goals is emphasized. An insufficient integration between social and ecological disciplines in Ukrainian science is identified along with probable reasons for this situation. The conclusions underscore the importance of a transdisciplinary approach to ecosystem services research. Future research prospects include expanding collaboration between researchers and practitioners, as well as refining methodological approaches for comprehensive ecosystem services study.

A Commons beyond the Human

This article critiques current theories of the commons as having been produced and sustained by human-centered paradigms of intellectual reasoning. It develops a commons beyond the human in response, which offers another way to envisage the commons and its pledge to the construction of better, alternate futures. Rather than advance yet another definition of the commons, this article examines how its means of knowledge production might ensue differently by dislocating the concept from its existing points of epistemological orientation. At the heart of this inquiry lies an attempt to rethink the commons concept beyond its regulating logics of liberal humanism, a radical reconsideration of the kinds of politics it should and might still enable beyond the lure of progressive reason. Turning to a reading of Alexis Wright’s 2013 novel The Swan Book, the article argues that a commons beyond the human gathers in the text through the more-than-human existence engendered between a young Aboriginal girl, Oblivia, and a flock of black swans. The novel presents neither the disavowal of the inherited knowledges of the commons nor a concrete policy to herald its appearance in a conjectural future, but a critical expansion of its transitive acts of worlding. This is made feasible by its insistence on upholding an Indigenous Australian ontological reality as the structuring provision for its narratives—one that has long stressed its dissonance from dominant Western genres of thinking and being.

“My Ancestors were Seafarers!”: New Media Design to Restore Collective Memory of Maritime Cultural Heritage in Public Spaces

Design plays a vital role in the process of knowledge production. To foster nationalism and national identity formation, the form uses design as means for public learning in museums and schools. However, history lessons are less desirable and often considered boring. The younger generation has new knowledge acquisition methods along with increasingly advanced technology. This research explores new media design in digital technology as a means of knowledge production. Taking the case of Indonesia, which in recent years has been trying to evoke collective memory as a maritime nation through its cultural heritage, learning about Austronesian speakers who are the maritime ancestors of the Indonesian archipelago in schools is developed as a preliminary study for further development into exhibition materials that can be utilized for community learnings in public spaces. This research uses a visual thinking map facility with a design thinking approach that puts forward ethnographic methods, including literature studies, group discussions, interviews, and participant observations. This study shows that digital technology can generate curiosity and excitement through gamification. Based on these findings, we conclude that the conceptual knowledge production process can be more effective if digital technology’s new media design approach also prioritizes aesthetic/sensory experiences.

The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing With Native American Epistemology

The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System: Dancing With Native American Epistemology

The Marginalized and Critical Theory: Dialectics of Universalism

ABSTRACT When the marginalized dare to speak of a world in which inequality is not the norm, they are accused of utopianism by those who usually do not take issue with faith-based assumptions that contradict even the most elementary of the laws of physics and biology. This irony has been going on unnoticed thanks to the bourgeoisie’s totalitarian domination of the means of knowledge production. Given this hegemony, it is imperative for any genuine form of critical thought to seek a revolutionary mode of perception and theorization to deliberately and insistently negate the actual for the sake of the realizable. This is precisely the forgotten essence of critical theory. From its origins in Marx’s work, critical theory was an anti-philosophy philosophy, a negative theory aimed at negating the capitalist and racist order and problematizing the unspoken rules of domination. These stateless outsiders who refused to compromise in return for personal and financial security left us a school of thought that adamantly defies the prevalent order in favor of universal emancipation. In defense of this stance, and negativity as a philosophy of resistance, this article aims to expand the potential scope of critical theory by enhancing its fidelity to the marginalized.

Notes on Lies, Secrets, and Truths in the Brazilian Congress

In the past decades, many studies have focused on various kinds of elites in a complex society, as well as on processes of governance and state administration. This acumen has expanded the repertoire of social meanings in both politics and state processes. However, regarding the corresponding ethnographic information, much has yet to be done. Several articles show how difficult it is to study prestigious institutions and propose alternative research strategies, but very few address the impact such discomfort has on ethnography as a means of knowledge production, over and above participant observation. This paper attempts to link the very challenge of researching powerful individuals to the difficulty of personally dealing with them and writing about them and their hidden agendas. It focuses on the Brazilian Congress and on recent events in Brazilian politics, including the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. It offers some possibilities for studying politics by taking seriously the ethnographic motto “from the native’s point of view.” Is this possible when the researcher has moral objections toward the “native”? How is one to do ethnographic work with people like politicians, who usually hold secrets and tell lies? What sort of knowledge and truth can we draw from such a “dialogue”?

Socially just pedagogies and social justice: The intersection of teaching ethics at higher education level and social justice

This article is part of a longer term project between the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape and Umea University in Sweden. At both the institutions the teaching of ethics as a module within social science curricula has been an important focus area. The critical investigation of the growth of the ethics modules in the Department of Religion and Theology addresses questions of the growth in the number of students taking ethics as a module that have been escalated in the last few years. This research seeks to explore social justice as a pedagogy to teach ethics. The article investigates the relationship between socially just pedagogies and social justice as a means of knowledge production. The ethics modules and students at the Department of Religion and Theology at the University of the Western Cape are the context of the study, and different socially just pedagogies will be investigated as relevant and significant pedagogies for teaching ethics for social change. Particular attention is given to the interaction between the lecturer, student and non-human phenomena as means of knowledge production. The nature of the interaction determines the effectiveness of pedagogies for a social justice agency.

Data Telling Stories and Stories Telling Data: The Role of Fiction in Shaping Ethnographic Truth

The following essay explores the use of fiction in ethnographic research. While the concept of fiction as a research methodology is not a new one, most proponents claim that fiction is most useful in the writing of ethnographic data. Despite the gradual acceptance of arts-based methods in ethnography, there still remains a false dichotomy of art and scientific research. This essay contributes to the discussion by arguing that fiction also plays an active role in producing knowledge and truth. To make this argument, the author brings together in conversation scholars of art and literature with social researchers. While multiple examples are illustrated to show how fiction creates knowledge in ethnography, the primary focus will be Clifford Geertz’s (2005) “Notes on a Balinese Cockfight.” The purpose is to demonstrate how fiction can be a means of knowledge production, so long as it is situated in sound research methods.

Decolonial pedagogy and English literary studies: problematics in a Pakistani context

ABSTRACT We propose a decolonial pedagogy in the teaching of English Literature at the undergraduate level in postcolonial Pakistan. We argue that the English literary texts that are taught in conjunction with different supplementary materials retain a West-centric tilt that requires disbanding. Therefore, we administered carefully designed worksheets. These encouraged marginal thinking across the differential socio-historical canvases that outline the prescribed texts, online lectures, supplementary reading materials and the students’ situatedness. The students used these resources as tools for practising a decolonial hermeneutics. By directing these tools towards their own lived situation, they intervened within the Western means of knowledge production and undid their alterity and historical silencing. By analysing the students’ assignments as sites of decolonial articulation, we propose that decolonial pedagogy can be used to generate an intercultural intellectual solidarity that allows the formerly colonised to rethink themselves in a manner that no longer talks back to the Empire.

Data agency at stake: MyData activism and alternative frames of equal participation

Data activism has emerged as a response to asymmetries in how data and the means of knowledge production are distributed. This article examines MyData, a data activism initiative developing principles for a new technical and commercial ecosystem in which individuals control the use of personal data. Analyzing material collected at a formative event shaping MyData activism, we examine how more just data arrangements are framed to enhance equal participation. Our analysis shows agreement on what is ultimately at stake: individual data agency and fair competition in the data economy. However, two alternatives are offered for what participation involves. Collaboration with commercial actors favors framing participation as agency in data markets, thereby potentially limiting the scope of what is at stake. The alternative framing presents a rights-based understanding of economic and civic agency, potentially leading to a broader understanding of participation in a datafied society.

University Spinout Formation: Legitimating Means of Knowledge Production for Competing Demands

Socio-economic demands and resource scarcity are thought to have engendered cognitive and organizational shift in universities. The notion of Mode 2 knowledge production (Gibbons et al., 1994) clai...

Pesquisa acadêmica sobre professores em interlocução com o plano nacional de educação (PNE 2014-2024): epistemologias, confluências e contradições

Este artigo propõe-se a interpelar a epistemologia da produção do conhecimento sobre educação, professores, sua formação e profissionalização, tanto na academia quanto na política voltada à educação, especificamente no documento que legisla a educação brasileira nos próximos dez anos: o PNE 2014-2024. O ponto de partida são suas epistemologias e historicidades. Trata-se dos resultados de uma ampla pesquisa desenvolvida em Rede, que analisa a produção acadêmica sobre professores a partir da base teórico-metodológica da dialética. Na articulação do trabalho em Rede, esse proceder busca fazer entender aos pesquisadores do campo como sua atividade investigativa credita posições ideológicas, que sustentam fins e meios à produção do conhecimento, logo à qualidade da formação e da educação. Neste trabalho apresenta-se um recorte no que se refere às produções do Programa de Pós-graduação em Educação, Faculdade de Educação/UFG, desenvolvidas a partir da base dialética, no período de 1999-2009, em que foram defendidos 317 trabalhos. Desse total, 93 versaram sobre a temática professores. Na análise, destacam-se os indicadores de qualidade social, método, ideário pedagógico e formação, construídos pela Rede. Entende-se que a epistemologia da prática sustenta a posição hegemônica, consolidando uma concepção mercadológica para a educação; a epistemologia da práxis é contra-hegemônica e, como tal, expressa a resistência à política neoliberal, exigindo qualidade social para a educação. Ambas sustentam princípios e fundamentos que podem fazer com que o campo da produção acadêmica produza ações contra-hegemônicas ou contribua para o consenso ativo e a política de Terceira Via e o reforce. Adotou-se, também, a epistemologia como ponto de partida da análise sobre a temática - Plano Nacional de Educação -, colocando-a em relação à produção acadêmica, com foco na formação e na educação. Identificou-se que, no caso da produção acadêmica, no período 1999-2007, há a presença da racionalidade da epistemologia da prática, o que favorece a construção de conceitos que atendem às demandas neoliberais. No período seguinte, 2008-2009, há a predominante presença da epistemologia da práxis, cuja racionalidade respeita as mediações de caráter histórico, cultural e social, como processo fundante de desenvolvimento do ser social, da humanização do homem, caracterizando a produção do período como contra- hegemônica. No campo da produção do conhecimento, como no caso do PNE, expressam-se forças antagônicas que se confrontam. No caso da política expressa no PNE, a epistemologia da prática mostra-se predominante na produção das racionalidades que fortalecem a hegemonia. Conclui-se a necessidade da cautela epistemológica e alerta-se para a concepção de qualidade proposta à formação de professores e à educação no documento.

Book Review: Jayadeva Uyangoda, Social Research: Philosophical and Methodological Foundations

Jayadeva Uyangoda, Social Research: Philosophical and MethodologicalFoundations, Social Scientists’ Association, 2015, Pages: vii + 657, Price:LKR 1800, ISBN: 978-955-0762-33-0

Responding to coastal problems: Interactive knowledge development in a US nature restoration project

Coastal decision-making is impacted by global climate change and region-specific changes related to population growth, economic activities and the natural environment. This results in complex and interdependent problems. Addressing these problems requires the involvement of decision-makers, researchers and other societal actors in knowledge production. However, such means of knowledge production are poorly understood when it comes to coastal regions. Using a conceptual framework that makes a distinction between project arrangements and knowledge arrangements, this paper analyses interactive knowledge development in a nature restoration project on the US West Coast. The project adopted a collaborative approach, and involved diverse organisations in developing knowledge for reaching its restoration solutions. The case study analysis results in seven causal mechanisms. The mechanisms are divided into two groups. One group discusses processes that affect interactive knowledge development, such as the need for public support. The other group explains how interactive knowledge development functions, for example through facilitation and the creation of safe environments for researchers and regulators. Through identifying these mechanisms, this paper contributes to an improved understanding of interactive knowledge development in coastal regions.

“Rather a manager and networker than a researcher”: converging technologies in the clinic

Technological developments brought about new approaches to and new insight into the functioning of the brain and neurological disorders. More specifically, advancement in the areas of neuroimaging, genomic technologies and molecular biology is conceived as a pathway to more differentiated diagnosis and appropriate treatment. In this regard, the convergence of technologies in the area of health care and medical research has significantly increased during the past two decades. The aim of this article is to better understand how the convergence of technologies in the field of neuroscience takes place at the micro-level of knowledge production, namely the clinic. It is based on the results of an ethnographic study conducted at an Epilepsy Monitoring Unit in Vienna. I start from the assumption that the convergence of technologies in the diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy anticipates a specific means of knowledge production that impacts on the understanding and definition of neurological conditions and the identity of patients and medical doctors simultaneously. One important result concerns the scientization of the way that people with epilepsy perceive, explain and understand epilepsy and the brain. On the one hand respective narratives seem to support the scientific definition of epilepsy; on the other, the failure of seizure control tends to induce a specific understanding of the brain as having unpredictable and uncontrollable mastery over body, memory and soul.

The Russian State and its Universities: A History of the Present

The article offers a broad historical overview of the university policy of the Russian state. It suggests that such a general picture could shed some fresh light not only on the role of the state in shaping the Russian university model throughout two and a half centuries, but also on the way of its functioning as the means of knowledge production and transmission. The wide chronological range of the overview primarily aims at singling out the major phases of this policy and at sketching its main directions. Five such phases are distinguished: 1) University as a project of enlightened monarchs (1724 – early nineteenth century); 2) University as a state enterprise aimed at modernization (long nineteenth century); 3) University as a socialist enterprise (1918–1991); 4) University as a post-socialist enterprise (1991 – early 2000s); and finally 5) the Russian university model reconsidered (ca. 2005–2012). The article’s narrative is structured chronologically in accordance with these phases, highlighting major characteristics of each.

Public Procurement and Forest Governance: A German Case Study of Governmental Influences on Market-Driven Governance Systems

With increased privatization of natural resource regulation, green or sustainable public procurement policies are emerging as incentives for sustainable development. Thus, a revival of governmental influences on so-called non-state, market-driven governance systems takes place. The paper exemplifies this development by reference to the green public procurement directives for wood products in Germany and its influence on major forest certification systems and forest governance. Using an approach of governmentality in relational space, the paper displays how governmental entities play a significant role in influencing forest governance systems and the greening of markets. The importance of the underlying relations that shape governmental instruments and their influences on forest certification and governance are evaluated from a German perspective. Acknowledging the market-driven aspects of forest certification systems, the paper highlights the often-neglected impacts of governmental regulation on emerging forest governance systems. Thus, the framework allows insights into how relations among political entities and their means of knowledge production are essential for processes of forest governance.

Iranian scholars and scientific publication in English: Attitudes, problems, and strategies

This study reports the results of an investigation which sought Iranian scholars’ attitudes, problems, and strategies publishing research articles in English. To this end, interviews were conducted with 72 academics across different disciplines (Sciences, Social Sciences, and Art and Humanities); then, a coding scheme was developed based on the relevant literature and the information provided by interviewees to codify the interviews. Findings revealed a detailed categorization of the participants’ attitudes, problems, and strategies. It was found that Iranian scholars had a positive attitude towards publishing papers in English as a means of knowledge production. The results also supported the findings of previous research that the most important problems during writing research articles for non-native scholars and scientists were the introduction and discussion sections. Also, the major strategies reported were revising and editing, discipline-specific reading, and practicing writing. Implications are discussed for EAP courses, university authorities, and the editorial boards and reviewers of the journals.

Bridging Practice and Theory: A Design Science Approach

ABSTRACTDespite ambitious efforts in various fields of research over multiple decades, the goal of making academic research relevant to the practitioner remains elusive: theoretical and academic research interests do not seem to coincide with the interests of managerial practice. This challenge is more fundamental than knowledgetransfer, it is one of diverging knowledgeinterestsand means of knowledgeproduction. In this article, we look at this fundamental challenge through the lens of design science, which is an approach aimed primarily at discovery and problem solving as opposed to accumulation of theoretical knowledge. We explore in particular the ways in which problem‐solving research and theory‐oriented academic research can complement one another. In operations management (OM) research, recognizing and building on this complementarity is especially crucial, because problem‐solving–oriented research produces the very artifacts (e.g., technologies) that empirical OM research subsequently evaluates in an attempt to build explanatory theory. It is indeed the practitioner—not the academic scientist—who engages in basic research in OM. This idiosyncrasy prompts the question: how can we enhance the cross‐fertilization between academic research and research practice to make novel theoretical insights and practical relevance complementary? This article proposes a design science approach to bridge practice to theory rather than theory to practice.

Pós-graduação no Brasil: da concepção "ofertista linear" para "novos modos de produção do conhecimento" implicações para avaliação

Considerando-se a emergência de novas formas de produção do conhecimento e a importância da formação de recursos humanos para atuar em atividades científicas e tecnológicas, este trabalho propõe uma reflexão sobre o modelo de avaliação que o sistema nacional de pós-graduação utiliza para atestar a qualidade dos cursos e o conhecimento produzido. Busca-se identificar quais são os principais desafios e as oportunidades deste sistema, com destaque para a importância da participação da comunidade acadêmica e dos tomadores de decisão em Políticas de Ciência e Tecnologia para a promoção de mudanças.