Knowledge Production Research Articles

A return of dominant paradigm in China: making Alibaba a development solution for rural China and the globe

ABSTRACT In 2011, Alibaba launched the Taobao Villages initiative, which enables rural e-commerce and connects rural sellers with urban buyers, highlighting the role of e-commerce platforms in reducing rural poverty. This approach was later integrated into national rural development policies. As the Digital Silk Road initiative progresses and Alibaba expands globally, Taobao Villages’ development experience is being promoted worldwide. Using Taobao Villages as a case study, this paper integrates the agrarian question in Marxian political economy with critical development communication studies. It explores why rural areas’ underdevelopment is perceived as a problem solvable by digital platforms, why this development approach emerged in post-socialist China, and its potential impacts. This paper argues that the Taobao Village exemplifies a dominant paradigm of development communication, produced by Alibaba, development experts, and government officials through shared knowledge practices. It examines the texts, intellectual frameworks, and diffusion processes involved in this knowledge production by employing critical discourse analysis. The study highlights how Taobao Villages reinforce the notion that informatization facilitates marketization, thus perpetuating and adapting three mainstream rural development ideas in post-socialist China. The underlying issue of rural China’s underdevelopment, the privatization and capitalization of rural social reproduction driven by China’s neoliberal globalization, sets the stage for another wave of digital labor exploitation. Furthermore, the widespread neoliberal ideology that advocates using e-commerce to foster social development creates internal challenges and generates external pressures within China.

Teaching Tech by Rote: Socialization into Digital Literacies in a Ghanaian Classroom

ABSTRACT Building on decades of interdisciplinary language-centered research on literacies, this article is an exploration of the many ideologies about technology, literacy, and “good” learners, and the resulting tangle of contradictory practices, that converge in rural Ghanaian Information and Communication Technology (ICT) classrooms. In addition to tracing how Western ideologies of technological transformation were imported into the design of ICT policy and curricula via international development organizations, the article contrasts the enduring routines and practices of hierarchical knowledge transfer in Ghanaian classrooms with assumptions about exploratory users embedded in the design of technologies primarily produced in and for North American contexts. In doing so, the article highlights the regimes of participation (Flamenbaum & George 2023), or the interplay between these taken-for-granted ideologies, technological affordances, and available roles for participation in knowledge production, which dynamically structure participatory engagements with digital literacies. Such a lens highlights the ways in which persistent policy framings of digital literacies as universal, neutral universal encounters between individuals and particular hardware or software enable and reproduce longstanding processes of disciplining marginalized populations.

Development of Community and Agricultural Associations through Social and Solidarity Economy with Collaboration of University

The Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) is a unique economic model that addresses contemporary community problems by democratising the economy through activities that promote sustainability, solidarity, and collective prosperity. Research on the SSE has increased in recent years, showing its potential as an alternative to dominant economic schemes. This article aims to analyse how the SSE can contribute to sustainability in rural sector associations in Ecuador through the Participatory Action Research (PAR) method. This method empowers various stakeholders, including the community, associations, and the university, to be actively involved in designing, developing, and implementing solutions to alleviate their problems. The results show that in the context of a developing country, this active participation, interaction, and commitment can identify the various problems that the rural sector and its associations are experiencing. This situation allows for possible joint action solutions, involving people who usually do not have decision-making power or are vulnerable, by diagnosing their socio-economic conditions and establishing a training programme where knowledge production is democratic, thus combining theoretical and practical elements according to the needs detected.

Language experts on a sinking island: critiquing language endangerment rhetorics through participation in and around a tabletop game

ABSTRACT The participatory study of language addresses the unequal relationships between the ‘researcher’ and the ‘researched’. As part of this undertaking, university-based researchers seek to develop more accessible ways of knowledge production to involve other participants in the creation of novel forms of representation at the levels relevant to them. The university-based participants of our research addressed this challenge by co-designing a language-centred tabletop game together with participants from a Romanian multilingual village. Bringing their language expertise into action, all participants collaboratively represented, analysed, and reflected on marginalised local language practices. The game was the culmination of several years of participatory research and aimed to explore interpretations of practices that are widely discussed as threatened, allowing for a critical approach to language endangerment rhetorics. Drawing on the ethnographic analysis of eight sessions in which players engaged with each other and the tabletop game’s creators, this article argues that developing innovative multimodal representations of language on the margins can make new knowledge more accessible, but in itself does not guarantee the subversion of language endangerment rhetorics. To have an impact on well-established discourses, the language experts’ participation throughout the research process is needed.

Deconstruction of Cultural Location: Evaluation of Dvija Kanai as the Pioneer of Namasudra Literature

Despite being one of the largest ethnic communities in Bengal delta, the Namasudras have never been acknowledged in the domain of production of knowledge, especially literature. The present article is a maiden attempt to locate the root of their literary heritage and to evaluate their contribution to literature. In this endeavour, the article transcends the Namasudra history that began in 1812, and goes beyond it, especially in the medieval period. It argues that the medieval folk poet Dvija Kanai who composed a folk ballad named Mahua was the first literary representative of this community. In this respect, this article deconstructs the modern literary culture of Namasudras, namely Dalit literature in which they have made a significant contribution. It argues that, unlike the modern Dalit Namasudra writers, the folk poet Dvija Kanai was the pioneer of Namasudra literature. 1

Invincible racism? The misuse of genetically informed arguments against Roma in Central and Eastern Europe

In this article, we challenge the idea that the development and the dissemination of scientific knowledge about Roma can be understood as “Eastern” or “Western.” Instead, we argue that the classical division between “science” and “pseudoscience” has the potential to fuel scientific racism and political and social exclusion across the globe. We narrate, for the first time, the role of sociobiology in the development of Roma “race science,” highlighting the ways in which its networks are developed and maintained. These specific mechanisms underlying the production of knowledge and its social and ideological effects may have further applications, such as the spread of mis- and dis-information. Our intent is to examine the attempts to deconstruct sociobiology and its application to Roma, by focusing on the effect of selective awareness among critics of sociobiology, which inevitably leads to the use of epistemic filters and heightens the risk of producing epistemic injustice. This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0 .

A proposed guide to reducing bias and improving assessments of decolonization in global health research

IntroductionThe movement to decolonize global health encompasses efforts to dismantle historically inequitable structures and processes in global health research, education, and practice. However, despite increasing literature on the decolonization of global health, gaps between action and knowledge exist in assessments of knowledge production. In this Perspective, we will outline potential biases in current approaches to assessing knowledge production and propose a systems-focused guide to improve the interrogation of knowledge production in this field.MethodsWe leverage the “Inner Setting” and “Outer Setting” domains of the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), a well-established, commonly-used implementation science framework to critically assess the status quo of decolonization and to develop criteria to help guide decolonization efforts in academic contexts. We defined the Inner Setting as academic and research institutions leading and participating in global health research collaborations, and the Outer Setting as the funding, editorial, and peer review policies and practices that influence knowledge production in global health. Research institutions in the Inner organizational domain continually interact with the Outer policy domains. We categorize the levels at which decolonization may occur and where action should be focused as follows: (1) North–South, (2) South–South, (3) Local South, and (4) Local North. Using CFIR domains and the levels of action for decolonization, we propose a multi-level guide to improve on the standardization, granularity, and accuracy of decolonization assessments in global health research.Conclusion and expected impactThe proposed guide is informed by our global health research expertise and experiences as African scientists with extensive exposure in both global North and global South research contexts. We expect that the proposed guide will help to identify and address the biases identified and will lead to better knowledge-driven action in the process of decolonizing global health research.

The framing of educational digitalization: A scoping review of empirical studies

AbstractThe aim of this scoping review is to systematically investigate the framing of European empirical research on digitalization for teaching and learning in the classroom within primary and secondary school (K‐12/K‐13). We believe it is crucial to gain insight in the framing of the knowledge production taking place in the fast‐evolving field of educational digitalization. The framing will influence the research results and conclusions published as well as potentially impact on how policy and practices of educational digitalization evolve. Our findings reveal that the studies of educational digitalization are spread relatively thin over a wide variety of academic journals and fields, where journals within the edtech field dominate in numbers. The dominant technological framing could indicate research driven by technological perspectives rather than pedagogical interests. The research is unevenly geographically distributed. There is a lack of European comparative studies as well as studies framing digitalization as something else than a tool for making learning more effective.

Traditional knowledge of baniwa peppers

It examines the scientific and technological context that surrounds the production of the Pimenta Baniwa product and the protection of its originality, with the aim of discussing the issue of traditional knowledge that involves indigenous entrepreneurship in the Amazon. The focus of the study is the trajectory of the composition of the Pimenta Baniwa product type Jiquitaia and indigenous female protagonism. It establishes as a methodological element the metric studies of information, especially the bibliometric and patentometric field to measure the scientific and technological state of the topic, analyzing the mapping of scientific production on the topic using bibliometrics and technological indicators in patentometrics. The results demonstrate that there is a lot of scientific and technological material that contains pepper from the genus Capsicum ssp. as the main theme, however, when it comes to Baniwa Pepper, little is found within scientific research and regarding the technological domain, no type of protection directed to the product was found. It is concluded that the production of knowledge on the topic discussed is predominantly focused on the agrarian field, with an emphasis on expanding production and safeguarding pepper, with notable little production that addresses in depth the indigenous entrepreneurship of the Baniwa people.

Practical Realism and the Philosophy of Science and Technology

In this article, I analyse the role of the concepts of ‘practice,’ ‘relations,’ and ‘process’ in Rein Vihalemm’s philosophy of science and the way he defined and articulated these concepts to study the production of scientific knowledge. Then, following Vihalemm’s line of reasoning, I will show how this approach is promising for thinking in a new way about some developments in contemporary sciences and technology.

FACTORS AFFECTING RESEARCH PRODUCTIVITY OF HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS

In the context of knowledge production and knowledge-based economy leading to current global competition among universities of the world, the research activity of universities is of particular importance in terms of creating, disseminating and using new knowledge for the benefits of society. From this point of view, it is considered appropriate to determine the factors having an influence on the research productivity of universities, and to study deeper the issues of proper organization, planning and management of the future research activity. In addition, as new educational policies prioritize the research activities of higher education institutions and encourage the establishment of research universities, it is of particular importance to investigate individual and institutional factors affecting research productivity.

Culture and the University as White, Male, Liberal Humanist Public Space

This essay takes readers on something of a journey. It opens by showing how, when it comes to the creative arts in the UK, it is upper‐ and middle‐class, privately educated, Oxbridge graduates who receive the bulk of the available financial support. It proceeds by arguing that their shared experience of private school and Oxbridge is a major reason so much of culture in England, and the university within it, is rather safe, homogenous and anti-intellectual, not to mention white, male and liberal humanist. At the same time, it maintains that it is not enough to change who is contributing to culture and the production of knowledge, and what they are being conditioned to write and publish about; what???s also needed is a change in how they are doing so. It ends by indicating some of the ways in which we can use new media and radical open access publishing to reinvent our (Euro-Western, modernist, middle-class, white, male) liberal humanist modes of being as writers and researchers.

Gentlemen, husbandmen, and industrious wives: The role of gender in imagining Indian agriculture

The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI), founded in 1820, remains the most important producer of English-language knowledge regarding the cultivation of plants in colonial India. Members included missionaries, colonial officials, tea and indigo planters, merchants and bankers, as well as the Bengali bhadralok elites of Calcutta and some Indian princes. The writings it produced were highly gendered. Often they focus on how “improving” the political economy and agricultural productivity would create masculine identities, such as gentlemen landowners and industrious peasant husbandman. Yet I also argue that women’s agricultural work was fundamental in imagining this path towards “improvement.” Using descriptions of Indian farming and labor practices from the Society’s meeting minutes and published transactions, as well as additional writings by its members and missionary founders, I show how many European members of the Society viewed women working outside of domestic pursuits as a sign of Indian inferiority. At the same time, many argued for the benefits of women’s work, which they viewed as fundamental in making Indian households more productive. Women and their labor were a lynchpin in creating the idea of the effeminate Indian man as well as the solution for improving him. It was this intersection of race with gender which helped to define agriculture as a discipline much closer to practical knowledge than abstract science. While some European women were able to participate in the Society’s production of scientific knowledge because of agriculture’s practical nature, Indian knowledge (whether from men or women) tended to be openly dismissed as tradition or habit rather than truly practical. The overlap of gender with race consequently helped to create a hierarchy between practical knowledge and tradition.

A Contextless Context: Postcolonial Studies and Terrorism in Israel and Gaza

ABSTRACT: The present article offers a critique of postcolonial theory, a perspective often applied to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Critiques of Israel today tend to frame the Hamas-led October 7th massacre in terms that either excuse or justify it. In this article I provide an overview of Palestinian terrorism and argue that it is the main driver behind Israeli policies, "a context of the context." The issue of terrorism in today's dominant postcolonial discourse is either completely absent or portrayed as a discursive manipulation, used by Israel to justify the oppression of Palestinians. Contrary to the well-known and well-studied reality of terrorism, postcolonial researchers purposefully present Israeli actions as a "contextless context" for the attack. Finally, the paper leverages the "context" concept within a Gramscian perspective, to discuss the interests, power, and resources behind the production of post-colonial knowledge. Framed as "organic intellectuals" embedded in a "historical bloc" such scholars weave together the interests of Western-Leftist parties and Political Islam, Iran, Qatar, Russia, and China into a fabric that applies academic justification for warmongering.

Data and the Aggregate Economy

Recent data technology innovations, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, have transformed the production of knowledge and increased the importance of data. This review explores how data—digitized information—has been modeled within classic macroeconomic frameworks. It compares the economics of data to other concepts such as ideas, patents, and learning-by-doing. This paper also shows potential ways to model applications for data, including innovation, process optimization, and matching. Because this research area is nascent, much of the article is devoted to open questions and directions for future data economy research. (JEL C80, D21, D83, E23, E24, J23)

Offshore campus development and the worlding of Dubai as an international education hub

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how Dubai is materially and semiotically produced as an “international education hub”. As part of developmental strategies to build a knowledge-based economy, Dubai's government mobilizes designated infrastructures and policies to attract numerous foreign universities to open offshore campuses in the city and to offer their programs and degrees. Drawing on scholarship on Dubai's (cultural) political economy and on globalizing cities, I conceptualize the positioning of Dubai as an education hub as a worlding strategy of Dubai's government rooted in a reinterpretation of the city's role in the global knowledge-based economy that emphasizes knowledge production. I analyze Dubai's worlding as an education hub through universities’ offshore campus investment decisions and business strategies, and show how the education hub strategy is closely entwined with Dubai's hitherto economic positionality, and with urban imaginaries of Dubai as a cosmopolitan spectacle and a city for economic opportunity. I contribute to a better understanding of worlding strategies by empirically showing how cities are being positioned and imagined under the knowledge-based economy. The analysis reveals that worlding cities as an education hub is contradictory and does not challenge existing ideas of global city formation, but reproduces and seeks to geographically shift established global hegemonies.

The cross-employment of PhDs across the university sector boundary: an analysis of Finnish register data

Tacit knowledge flows can be facilitated by employment transitions, such as for example the transitions of PhDs from university employment to industry. There are however barriers to transitions into and out of university employment, and as a consequence, such transitions are relatively rare. PhDs can circumvent the barriers to permanent transitions by simultaneous secondary employment relationships. Though we know that such cross-employment exists, we do not know how common it de facto is. In this paper, we use a nine-year panel of daily-level employment microdata on the full population of Finnish PhDs to show that about 30% of university-employed PhDs are cross-employed outside of universities. This is a substantial share, and its magnitude alone suggests a central but underappreciated role for cross-employment in contemporary knowledge production and dissemination. We furthermore find that similar numbers of non–university-employed PhDs are cross-employed at universities as university PhDs are cross-employed outside of universities, and that many cross-employment relationships are in non-technical fields, and with public sector organizations. This illustrates the importance of understanding the nature of knowledge flows other than the unidirectional flows of technical knowledge from universities to industrial firms.

Living labs as transformative incrementalism: lessons learned on the role of a university living lab in mobilising just sustainabilities on campus

ABSTRACT The Living Lab approach is an opportunity for diverse actors to co-create solutions to solve real-world issues. Simon Fraser University, situated on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh, Katzie, Kwikwetlem, Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples in British Columbia, Canada developed a Living Lab program to apply the university’s leading climate research expertise to solve its own infrastructure, operations and service challenges. Projects were led by “Living Lab Scholars,” graduate students who form teams with faculty and staff to co-design research to help the university meet its sustainability and equity goals. The scholars took part in experiential learning, received mentorship and financial support and were provided with the opportunity to apply their academic research skills to address four sustainability issues: (1) waste management, (2) sustainable transportation, (3) carbon footprint of streaming, and (4) food security. While being grounded in participatory action research and integrating justice, decolonisation, equity, diversity and inclusivity considerations into the process design, the limited resources, time scarcity and operational reality reflected that the reality of implementing the solutions resulted in varying degrees of transformational impact. This paper applies autoethnography to enable the participants to reflect upon how the university as a system can support advances in just sustainabilities and highlights practical lessons learned for future Living Lab practitioners who aim to mobilise their solutions on campus. Findings from the project highlight the role of the Living Lab in supporting “transformative incrementalism” and challenging the conventions of academic knowledge production.

‘I Have a Folder in My Email Called Hate Mail’: Academic Public Engagement, Digital Hate and the Unequally Distributed Risks of Visibility

Public engagement through ‘traditional’ and social media is an increasingly important way for scholars to communicate research with wider audiences, with academics encouraged to maintain a public profile to disseminate work. This has important activist potential for radical knowledge production, but only if all voices can participate on equal, safe terms. Existing work on digital hate rarely accounts for the diversity of the academic community, and therefore we cannot adequately account for how certain voices are being excluded from public debate. Drawing on data from eighty-five survey responses and thirteen in-depth interviews with UK academics across disciplines, this article argues that the risks of visibility are unevenly distributed in ways that exacerbate harm to already marginalised groups. Our data challenges popular notions that visibility is its own reward. We demonstrate how visibility exposes academics to the kinds of online misogyny, racism, ableism, classism, xenophobia, homophobia, fatphobia and transphobia that characterise cultures of online hate. We reflect upon how academics in the ‘wrong’ body are denied intellectual authority in public debate through abuse targeting their intersectional identities and right to belong. Our data finds that digital hate not only affects academics’ careers, but also causes significant physical and mental harms that seep into academics’ personal lives. There cannot be meaningful, radical potential in public knowledge sharing if we cannot protect those most at risk of harm in the process.

‘Just One Day of Unstructured Autonomous Time’: Samuel A. Moore Supporting Editorial Labour for Ethical Publishing within the University

Universities have traditionally supported the distribution of critical and cultural theory through departmental and centre publishing (e.g. Working Papers in Cultural Studies) and the establishment of university presses. However, over recent decades publishing has been increasingly outsourced to commercial providers, buttressed by volunteer academic labour extracted for profit by the publishing industry. At the same time, faced with ongoing casualisation and ever-increasing workloads, the labour required for academic publishing is severely undervalued by the university and in a permanent state of crisis. In this article we put forward a radical proposal for universities to provide scholars dedicated time to support publishing as part of their academic service work. We intervene strongly into discourses that approach the publishing labour crisis by arguing for calculative solutions in the form of payment or credit. Instead, this article explores reorienting the labour underpinning academic publishing within the university itself by positioning it as an integral part of scholarly research and what it means to be a researcher. We make this argument through an in-depth engagement with debates on academic citizenship on the value of service work and discourses on academic labour derived from within critical university studies. We further support our argument by drawing on discussions on labour and open access (OA) publishing, referencing various alternative models currently being developed that, based on scholar-led, library-led and ‘new’ university press publishing, are experimenting with innovative ways to value and perform labour relations as part of community-controlled collective organisations. As universities are increasingly financially and infrastructurally supporting such initiatives, particularly with recourse to library budgets, we explore how this in many ways has left labour issues for publishing as a service performed as part of an academic’s workload unaltered. We therefore argue for the urgent need to reconfigure how universities view the labour behind academic publishing, to support more ethical engagements and relations with publishing, bring knowledge production back under the control of academic communities, and to support greater academic autonomy within universities.