Practices Of Knowledge Production Research Articles

State of Reciprocity: The “Looping Effect” in the Circular Production of Colonial Knowledge, Social Customs, and Tax Policy in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Indonesia

Abstract This article traces Hacking's “looping effect” in colonial policies and practices of taxation, coerced labour, and governance in Indonesia. It argues that knowledge production for the purpose of taxation was a two-way, interactive process which was in particular influenced by complexes of local indigenous social organization, institutions, mentalities, and behaviour as expressed through adat (Indonesian systems of political-social norms and customary law). Such patterns and systems, the article reveals, were internalized into and started working reciprocally with colonial policy, knowledge production, and administrative practices. Taxation made up and changed people, but underlying strategies to categorize and “make known” subjects were also recognized and actively used, evaded, or influenced by these subjects and by local intermediaries. Consequently, colonial knowledge created an institutional framework that reoriented the self-perception of these subjects and intermediaries, which then changed and reconditioned popular responses to the colonial state. Systems of colonial knowledge were thus modified to eventually fit the realities they were supposed to describe, influence, and legitimize, creating a looping effect between colonial, “made up,” and actual social realities.

A contextual approach to decolonising IR: Interrogating knowledge production hierarchies

Abstract Although calls to decolonise International Relations (IR) have become more prominent, the endeavour becomes infinitely more complex when searching for concrete approaches to decolonise IR knowledge production. We posit that decolonising IR, a global counter-hegemonic political project to dismantle and transform dominant knowledge production practices, must be enacted according to context-specific particularities. Contexts shape practices of epistemological decolonisation, since knowledge hierarchies are enacted and experienced – and must be challenged and dismantled – differently in different sites. Yet although acknowledged as important, contexts are understudied and under-theorised. This raises several questions: how do contexts matter to IR knowledge production, in what ways, and with what effects? This article disaggregates six contexts in IR knowledge production – material, spatial, disciplinary, political, embodied, and temporal – and explores how they impact academic practices. We bring together hitherto-disparate insights into the role of contexts in knowledge production from Global IR, Political Sociology, Feminist Studies, Higher Education Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, illustrating them with empirical evidence from 30 interviews with IR scholars across a variety of countries and academic institutions. We argue that an interrogation of the inequalities produced through these contexts brings us closer towards developing concrete tools to dismantle entrenched hierarchies in IR knowledge production.

Digital Methods: An STS Challenge to Methodological Digitization in Social Science Research

ABSTRACT The integration of digital technologies into social science has catalyzed the development of fields such as digital sociology, digital humanities, and digital social sciences more broadly. This technological shift has significant methodological implications for social science research, which are being increasingly discussed. This discussion raises critical questions about the potential and limitations of merging traditional social research methodologies with digital innovations. Digitized and digital methods have brought about promises of a new era in social science research. However, some scholars have highlighted the challenges and limitations associated with this methodological transition, including data-relevant considerations, skill and expertise issues, and ethical concerns. From the vantage point of advancements in science and technology studies (STS) – a discipline that has engaged with the methods and practices of knowledge production for some decades – I will explore five additional methodological challenges posed by the digitization of social science research that has been largely overlooked or neglected in the literature of digital methods. Our analysis concludes that while digital methods can serve as valuable complementary tools, they are not sufficient to fully engage with the core practices and phenomena of social science research. Thus, digital and traditional methods can coexist, albeit not in a symmetrical manner.

“Social Media Has Been Helpful in Learning About Myself and Finding My Community”: The Affordances and Constraints of ICT‐Based Queer History Content Creation

ABSTRACTThis paper reports on findings from 31 semi‐structured interviews with North American Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)‐based content creators who focus on LGBTQIA+ history. While the research broadly explored the information practices and digital preservation strategies of these content creators, this paper highlights how the participants navigated their respective ICT choices (ranging from personal blogs to Instagram accounts) and what affordances and constraints emerged from these choices. The paper highlights how such potentialities and pitfalls across varied social media and web‐based platforms informed the sociotechnical practices of queer historical knowledge production and how the participants leveraged the features of various ICTs to expand the visibility of queer‐affirming content and resources. The paper concludes by exploring these practices and their theoretical and practical implications for practitioners at the intersection of digital curation and archiving marginalized histories with an explicit emphasis on collaborative rather than extractive opportunities for collaboration between such content creators and cultural heritage institutions.

Instrumentalising race: why critical terrorism studies continues to have a race problem

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates how the racial logic of instrumentalisation – the intended exploitation of racialised peoples for intellectual capital – shapes the field of Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS). I argue that the problem of instrumentalisation highlights CTS’s limitations to advance anti-racism because of how it standardises non-racist (rather than anti-racist) logic and practices in academia. Adopting a postcolonial perspective inspired by Frantz Fanon and Robbie Shilliam, this paper discusses the problem of CTS furthering the structural issue that is counterterrorism policymaking spaces privileging “white faces” rather than engaging knowledge production practices that are more cognisant of the relational attributes of ontology. This distinction of “rather than” is argued to be an important emphasis in how this distinction challenges the quality of criticality within CTS if CTS cannot meet its core commitments in the context of anti-racism. The aim of pursuing this evaluation is not to replace white faces with non-white representations by way of calling for diversity in the CTS professoriate. The focus of this critique of CTS is instead to explain why CTS scholars should re-examine their philosophical commitments and knowledge relations to evaluate how they can better demonstrate intellectual generosity and allyship in service to anti-racist intellectual traditions.

Identifying innovation roadblocks: unveiling knowledge and innovation patterns that hinder commercialisation

ABSTRACT While intellectual property (IP) management is critical for innovation, specific knowledge and innovation patterns within it can obstruct commercialisation. This study explores how these patterns impede the path to market success for emerging innovations. We introduce a novel method to detect and recognise these patterns, offering insights into factors contributing to innovation system failure. Applying the Triple Helix Model, we leverage text mining, network analysis, and structural equation modelling within the Russian pharmaceutical industry. Our research reveals limitations in the triple helix model’s ability to capture problematic innovation patterns. Notably, local-closed and local semi-closed innovation networks emerge as significant barriers to commercialisation, further exacerbated by foreign dominance. While strong actor synergy is crucial, it alone cannot guarantee competitive advantage. Factors like geographical distance, disciplinary silos, and limited external collaboration further hinder success. This study highlights the need for effective knowledge production and collaboration practices, alongside strong synergy, to achieve market-leading innovations. Recognising and addressing these patterns can inform policy decisions, ultimately fostering more robust innovation outcomes, advancing innovation system theory in the process.

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.

Transforming the Practice of Knowledge Production through Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Research

Transforming the Practice of Knowledge Production through Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Research

‘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.