Practices Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

Addressing the Colonial Legacies of Science

Science needs to address its colonial legacies. While the Te Ara Paerangi Future Pathways envisioned reforms of the research, science and innovation system has lost momentum, individuals and organisations across Aotearoa recognise, and are reaffirming, that the country’s future prospects lie in embracing Tiriti-led policies and practices. In 2021 Manaaki Whenua Landcare Research (a Crown research institute mandated to ensure that the life force and vitality of the land is strong) committed to weaving the principles of te Tiriti o Waitangi into its fabric. As employees, we use social practice theory in this article to evaluate the changes our organisation is experiencing on its journey to being Tiriti-led, and assess the lessons, impacts, successes and failures. This case study highlights the values–action gaps currently evident across the science system and provides insights into the various elements required to enable transformative change and new social norms within knowledge production policies and practice.

Field-building and the epistemic culture of AI safety

The emerging field of “AI safety” has attracted public attention and large infusions of capital to support its implied promise: the ability to deploy advanced artificial intelligence (AI) while reducing its gravest risks. Ideas from effective altruism, longtermism, and the study of existential risk are foundational to this new field. In this paper, we contend that overlapping communities interested in these ideas have merged into what we refer to as the broader “AI safety epistemic community,” which is sustained through its mutually reinforcing community-building and knowledge production practices. We support this assertion through an analysis of four core sites in this community’s epistemic culture: 1) online community-building through Web forums and career advising; 2) AI forecasting; 3) AI safety research; and 4) prize competitions. The dispersal of this epistemic community’s members throughout the tech industry, academia, and policy organizations ensures their continued input into global discourse about AI. Understanding the epistemic culture that fuses their moral convictions and knowledge claims is crucial to evaluating these claims, which are gaining influence in critical, rapidly changing debates about the harms of AI and how to mitigate them.

“You Could Hear a Hair Pin Drop”: Queer Utopianism and Informal Knowledge Production in the Gaylor Closeting Conspiracy Theory

Rumors about Taylor Swift’s sexuality have persisted since the early days of her career. They have coalesced into an online subculture known as “Gaylor.” Gaylor is a novel kind of conspiracy theory known as a “Closeting Conspiracy Theory” (CCT). CCTs involve speculating about a public figure’s sexuality, gathering pertinent evidence, and producing fan knowledges, often informally, on social media. Like shipping and slash fiction (which they often involve) CCTs are largely feminized. Through a qualitative content analysis of 200 TikTok videos, this article situates Gaylor as a CCT that has developed into a kind of knowledge culture. Analyzing this knowledge culture using Emily Coccia’s notion of too-close reading and José Muñoz’s queer utopianism reveals specialized practices of knowledge production, including informal boundary work. As Gaylors get “too close” to Swift’s star text, triangulating lyrics and music videos with images and videos from Swift’s life, they produce folk literary criticism. Muñoz’s queer utopianism saturates Gaylor discourses, with many Gaylors engaging in a specific type of conspiracy-inflected queer utopianism: the doomsday coming-out. The doomsday coming-out pushes the date of the Swift’s purported coming out back further and further after each anticipated album or music video release, not unlike the date of the apocalypse in a doomsday cult. Ultimately, the function of producing CCT knowledge in the Gaylor community is propelled forward by imagining queer futures, reflecting on personal identity, building community, and pushing back against heterosexist consensus.

Classroom communities for everyone

As people with power in schools, teachers and administrators make instructional decisions that shape opportunities in classrooms for students to learn. Educators’ words and actions, especially related to the treatment of students and their ideas, are foundational for creating equitable learning communities in our classrooms and schools. David Stroupe, Lindsay Berk, and Anna Kramer examine the creation and growth of learning communities through a particular lens of inequity: epistemic injustice. Briefly, epistemic injustice is a philosophical perspective that deals with inequities associated with knowledge and knowledge production practices. The authors provide concrete examples from two classrooms in which the teachers actively disrupt epistemic injustice.

Critiques of Development using Foucault’s Discourse and Power Theory

Analyzing the modern development program through Michel Foucault's theory of discourse and power provides insights into its origins and shortcomings. This research aims to critique modern development theory in terms of Foucault’s theory of discourse and power. Development, and modern development theory as well as Escobar’s articles about the implementation of Foucault’s theory were studied. The research found that the discourse surrounding development serves as a means of exerting power and control, often driven by the interests of dominant nations. However, despite ambitious promises, development programs frequently fail to achieve meaningful progress due to the power dynamics and inequalities embedded in the modern development discourse which excludes local discourse. Applying Foucault's framework challenges universal claims and grand narratives, opening avenues for critical analysis and a post-modern understanding of development. This approach prompts a reevaluation of power dynamics, knowledge production, and discursive practices, aiming for context-specific approaches that address the diverse needs of underdeveloped nations.

Nomads, thresholds, and leaves: Queer entanglements within the AcademicConferenceMachine

AbstractThis paper presents the mise en espace of an anti‐drama‐liturgy written for the Conference “Salute e Benessere delle Persone Transgender e Gender Diverse: Buone Prassi e Nuove Prospettive [Wellbeing of Transgender and Gender Diverse People: Good Practices and New Perspectives]”. By providing an example of conferencing differently, the paper depicts an elliptical (round)table that questions normative assumptions on gender and sexuality and established practices of academic knowledge production and dissemination. It does so, along the edge of anti‐binarism, in three ways. Firstly, there is the choice of an elliptical (round)table that is polycentric: it broadens the point of view from the margins. Secondly, our writing sought to favor embodied questioning and dialog over the structured speech report typical of conferences, and the third way is inherent to the genre of theatrical writing related to the mise en espace format, which enables us to ask questions about the relationship between our bodies, broader materiality, and the dominant norms of academic and gendered practices. The intertwining of these elements makes our queering the AcademicConferenceMachine, which is an invitation to recognize the political performativity and imaginative possibilities of any (academic) encounter.

Taking and Making Place Through Sound: From the Phonotope to the Phonocene

Although the spatiality of sounding and listening practices has been broadly and deeply discussed within humanities in general and sound studies in particular, the implications of such “place-taking” and “place-making” characteristics remain highly relevant nowadays. Starting from Peter Sloterdijk’s concept of the phonotope, through which sound and space are closely related in the production of social, it will be argued, following philosopher and ethologist Vinciane Despret, that the importance of sound for “making place” matters far beyond human-centered thought. In what she calls the Phonocene, Despret invites us not only to listen to others, humans and nonhumans, but also to compose with multiple modes of existence, through the sonic. In short, the Phonocene addresses the importance of sonic thinking, which, for instance in sociology, challenges hegemonic and anthropocentric practices of knowledge production. Experimenting with “thinking-with sounds” within social sciences and philosophy thus implies not only to understand the spatiality inherent to the practices of sounding and listening, but to engage with those practices critically, as they are also always “situated,” in the sense of Donna Haraway, and therefore, in the midst of multiple “interests,” as understood in Actor-Network Theory, including a multiplicity of human, nonhuman, and more-than-human actors.

Tech hype as a mnemonic process: Misremembering the land problem in India

This research article considers tech hype as a mnemonic process that makes us remember or forget the world, technology, and the myriad ways we can relate to it. The argument is based on an auto-ethnographic vignette and a close reading of two key texts in the discourse on using technology for land management in India. The article shows how technology, the social, and the practice of knowledge-production can be rethought in this mock battle between hype and criticism of hype.

The travelled landscape of Benjamin Harrison and the imagined eolithic world of the Kentish Weald

ABSTRACT This paper seeks to show the relationship between the travelled landscape of the late nineteenth century Kentish Weald, the survey and collecting expeditions of Benjamin Harrison and his associates, and the imagined early Palaeolithic and ‘Eolithic’ life-ways that these investigators sought to uncover. We show how fieldwork shaped thinking and practice, and how walking served to organize the bodily practices of knowledge production.

Epistemic Contests in Journalism: Examining Struggles over Journalistic Ways of Knowing

In the face of struggles over journalistic epistemology arising in the present, this study proposes the concept of “epistemic contests” as a way of analyzing efforts by various actors to shape knowledge production norms and practices. Epistemic contests are not reducible to a single event or example, but instead encompass broader ongoing debates around the legitimacy of various epistemic practices of news. In analyzing these debates, this approach is attuned to the nuances of the present digital media culture as well as the current political and cultural moment. This article lays out key theoretical and methodological components of epistemic contests as applied to journalism and suggests a future research program for digital journalism studies scholars with special attention directed toward journalistic objectivity and its attendant norms. The value of this concept lies in providing a tool to examine the contestation over appropriate knowledge practices, the power to make such distinctions, and the forms of news that emerge.

Aleksei Peterson in the Southern Veps Villages in 1965–1969: A Chapter from the History of Soviet Estonian Ethnography

The article examines the five expeditions made by Aleksei Peterson, director of the Estonian Ethnography Museum, and his colleagues to the Southern Veps villages (Leningrad Oblast, northeastern Russia) in the late 1960s. These research trips marking the rebirth of the Finno-Ugric direction in Estonian ethnography (ethnology) constitute an important part of disciplinary history. The article, based mainly on fieldwork diaries, focuses on the everyday life during the research trips (logistic challenges, relations with local authorities and the Veps) and analyses the attitudes and knowledge production practices of Soviet Estonian ethnographers interested, above all, in traditional peasant culture.

‘Whispered in corridors’: Intra‐national politics and practices of knowledge production in South African Human Geography

AbstractReflections on the state of Geography around the globe have noted multiple challenges and opportunities—including a call for the reconfiguring of the discipline as a critical space of care and praxis (Daya, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 47, 9, 2022). Such a call is indelibly connected to broader conversations on the politics of knowledge production and critical engagements with cultures of knowledge production. In order to realise the reconfiguring of the discipline, it is imperative to engage with the multi‐scalar politics and practices of knowledge production, to look beyond global inequalities and critically examine the intra‐national inequities and structural biases of knowledge production. Through a focus on South African Human Geography and detailed analysis of publication data and interviews with staff at universities across the country, we critically examine how the ‘haunting’ of apartheid legacies contributes to a double‐peripheralisation of staff at historically disadvantaged institutions while critical conversations remain ‘whispered in corridors’. This more granular engagement with the politics and practices of knowledge production highlights the entwining of intra‐ and inter‐national privilege which produces a mosaic of ‘cores’ and ‘peripheries’ in the uneven landscape of knowledge production that requires critical scholars to engage with on multiple scales in order to realise a more just and equitable knowledge economy.

The politics of methods in transitional justice knowledge production

Abstract This article is concerned with how practices of knowledge production relate to the international politics of transitional justice (TJ). It argues that quantitative scholarly studies—called for in response to the anecdotal and normative studies that prevailed in early TJ scholarship and which, it is argued, continue to shape TJ sub-fields such as the study of local justice—are themselves committed to the normative framework and the goals of TJ that they seek to provide the tools to challenge. Applying a ‘politics of methods’ lens, the article foregrounds the interpretive work of surveys and the methodological choices of large-N impact studies which circle these works back to narrowly defined ideas of what TJ ought to be. The conclusions show how these ‘politics of methods’ contribute to the decontestation of an inherently political choice and practice, and predetermine what policy and practice options are considered useful, relevant and even imaginable. As such they shape that which they claim only to examine. Contributing to both critical methodological debates in International Relations and nascent scholarship on the research–policy–practice nexus in TJ, the analysis provides an under-examined example of the co-constitutive relationship of what is considered to be detached knowledge production and politics.

Cyber-ludic pedagogies: towards a post-critical methodology of video games as cultural sites

In this paper, we explore contradictions in the uneven movements of engaging video games in learning, and the affective deployment of play as a strategic mechanism to guarantee institutional and civic compliance. To that purpose, we are tracing the links between positivist, evaluative paradigms in Digital Game-Based Learning (DGBL) scholarship, arguing that a linear assessment of knowledge transmission does not adequately engage the complexity of virtual worlds and the learning processes they mobilize. As a response, we propose a cyber-ludic pedagogical framework that embeds gamers’ knowledge-production practices and performances in the wider social context they occupy, acknowledging their hybridity as digital and physical experiences. We apply this framework to a case-study reading of a vlog entry performed as a humorous guide to social distancing at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our reading recognizes the operationalization of knowledge communication modes as tropes while emphasizing discrete projects of brand awareness, identity formation, and claims to digital space. Our analysis of the vlog performance of what we term ‘technodeviance’ serves to de-exoticize the deviant in educational research; problematize the assumption of one-way knowledge transmission and representation; and center the pedagogical value of game and play data that is found in popular culture texts and in user-generated content.

Knowing from conflict: interculturality as a space of interaction for the production of knowledges

ABSTRACT This article problematizes the interaction between diverse actors for the production of knowledges. From a phenomenological approach of three different experiences, I argue that the concept of interculturality and the practice of knowledge production based on it, will allow more symmetrical processes, with better knowledges, with a greater empowerment of non-academic communities, and with a more inclusive knowledge production from academic communities. I rely on political ontology to show that interactions cannot aspire (only) to dialogue and collaboration as a normative horizon, but that the production of knowledge requires the recognition of conflict. I consider interculturality can help to produce an interaction that incorporates conflict as an expression of ontological difference, which enhances its transformative character by recognizing asymmetries, establishing meeting points, and rethinking the methods used in interaction.

Political Economy and Knowledge Production in the Making of the Viceroyalty of New Granada

Objective/Context: During the eighteenth century, officials from different colonial powers attempted to turn the viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada—present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Panama—into an economically viable territory. The Spanish Crown embraced its most radical jurisdictional reform in centuries to exercise effective state control, extract more revenue, and defend the colonies from foreign incursions. This article explores the particularities of New Granada’s economic governance and argues that colonial officials produced local discourses of political economy to turn unfamiliar spaces into familiar places for economic, political, and military ends. In doing so, producing knowledge about the land and its resources became a key bureaucratic practice that shaped the imagining of a paradoxical territoriality in Northern South America. First, I detail the impact of political economy frameworks on imperial governance and bureaucratic practices. I then showcase how administrative narratives, mapping projects, and fiscal networks reveal the workings of Bourbon economic governance and the search for regional integration. Methodology: This article is built from an analysis of archival documents consisting of a selection of evidence from chorographic texts about New Granada and its provinces produced between 1720 and 1808. Originality: Reflecting on the ways in which the pursuit of knowledge for wealth creation affected the creation of territorialities contributes to uncovering how the imperial political economy was never a top-down imposition. Local officials negotiated it vis-à-vis singular geographical realities and knowledge production practices. Conclusions: Chorographic texts were central devices of imperial reform. The search for wealth production and territorial integration occurred in colonial outposts, not in intellectual treatises in Europe. In forging New Granada as an integrated, potentially rich place, bureaucrats’ experience of moving across the territory and inscribing the landscape on paper shaped perceptions of cohesion and difference, economic dependence, and regional fragmentation.

Whose (in)security? Gender, race and coloniality in European security policies: Introduction to the Special Issue

ABSTRACT Building on feminist and postcolonial theoretical approaches across International Relations (IR) and security studies, this Special Issue advances an emerging research agenda within EU studies by shedding light on the gendered and racialised logics of EU security and their links to colonial histories and practices. Together, the contributions to this Special Issue demonstrate how EU security is intrinsically connected to and constituted by histories of colonialism, racism and patriarchy. At the same time, they also highlight how the colonial, racialised and gendered dynamics that underpin EU security and that are mobilised by the EU, its institutions and member states are always complex and shifting. Importantly, they do so by decentring our analysis of EU security moving our focus often away from the EU and towards different, somewhat unexpected sites and geographical locations of EU security. The current war in Ukraine underwrites the need for more historical, contextual and decentred work on EU security, while also highlighting the necessity to reflect on dominant practices of knowledge production and the experiences of people living in and with war through a feminist and postcolonial lens.

Becoming the Muʿallim: how tradition and innovation made a Nahḍa icon

AbstractOne cannot speak of the nineteenth-century Beirut Nahḍa and not mention Muʿallim Buṭrus al-Bustānī (1819–83). This article examines how al-Bustānī utilized the Arabic oratorical tradition and the innovative medium of print to create the Muʿallim brand. The first section analyses his Khuṭba fī Ādāb al-ʿArab (An Oration on the Culture of the Arabs, 1859) to illustrate how he operationalized the Arabic rhetorical style to position himself as an eloquent public intellectual. This article next discusses how he built parts of this lecture on sariqāt (literary thefts/legitimate borrowings) from his contemporaries and participated in the collective practice of knowledge production. Lastly, al-Bustānī's advertising tactics in print to promote his public persona are explored. This article demonstrates that al-Bustānī successfully established himself as the Muʿallim by coupling the enduring cultural power of Arabic oration with the modern might of print.

“We Witches.” Knowledge Wars, Experience and Spirituality in the Women’s Movement During the 1970s

During the 1970s, feminist activists reappropriated the figure of the witch in various ways as a symbol of alterity, political radicalism, feminist revolt or victimhood, or the presentation of subversive (healing or bodily) knowledge. The article investigates these witch constructions with a focus on its experiential foundations drawing on appropriations in Western Germany within a larger transatlantic history. First, it provides a brief overview of witch discourses in the 1970s, highlighting radical feminist, health-political and artistic milieus, based on representative Western European journals and movement literature. The article emphasizes the variety of witch images and its epistemic foci, showing that however different these approaches may appear, they all created women’s alterity. Second, the article examines alternative practices of knowledge production, focusing on health guides and advice literature, as well as on approaches to experience in consciousness-raising groups. This section demonstrates how witch discourses both enabled the movement’s knowledge empowerment, but were also part of complex boundary work within the milieus, such as in the debates about the relationship between experiential knowledge and theory. The last section shows how closely and in what ways spiritualist approaches were linked to this boundary work. The article argues that feminist milieus constituted themselves within the framework of feminist epistemologies against and within established knowledge cultures, thereby drawing further boundaries within the movement. In analyzing the “evidence of experience” (Scott) produced by witch discourses its overarching aim is to demonstrate that their historical relevance initially laid in its standpoint-creating character.

Citizen science and Post-Normal Science’s extended peer community: Identifying overlaps by mapping typologies

At first sight, citizen science – the opening of scientific enterprise to a wider group of people, many of whom are not professionally engaged in research institutions, seems to align well with the concept of an extended peer community of the framework of Post-Normal Science (PNS). PNS is concerned with the social robustness of applied science, science-based professional consultancy, and scientific advice for policy in situations of high stakes, high uncertainties, and contested values. Creating opportunities for engagement of citizens in science seems an obvious fit – but is that true for all diverse forms that citizen science can take? Current citizen science includes many types of activities and practices. As a result, the role of the participants within a given scientific knowledge production practice and their relation to scientists vary. This paper leverages the PNS framework to gain a more in-depth understanding of different ways in which diverse citizen science initiatives can contribute to improving the science-policy interface and provide tool sets and approaches for extended peer review, or not. For this purpose, this paper develops an analytic framework drawing on several widely used typologies of citizen science. The twenty four activities and practices of citizen science that they cover are mapped onto different zones of problem solving strategies – applied science, professional consultancy, and post-normal science, which are presented in the literature on PNS in terms of uncertainty and decision stakes while also noticing their value conflicts and urgency. The analysis shows that each of the four zones of scientific activities can be associated with citizen science initiatives. We deduce that citizen science is not automatically imbued with transformative potential, but that this potential depends on the purpose and design of the citizen science initiative. Certain types of citizen science activities and approaches are more relevant to researchers and practitioners with an interest in PNS who are actively seeking to reconfigure the science-policy-practice interface than others. This analytic framework and consequent mapping can support PNS practitioners in identifying the type of citizen science activities and designing fit-for-purpose initiatives. Moreover, the mapping exercise conveys a more nuanced understanding of different possible dimensions, merits, and limitations of the extended peer community concept. Similarly, for citizen science researchers and practitioners, the mapping of typologies within the three zones of problem solving strategies can allow a better selection of citizen science activities for those purposes.