Mobilizing Global Knowledge

"In 2018, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees documented a record high 71.4 million displaced people around the world. As states struggle with the costs of providing protection to so many people and popular conceptions of refugees have become increasingly politicized and sensationalized, researchers have come together to form regional and global networks dedicated to working with displaced people to learn how to respond to their needs ethically, compassionately, and for the best interests of the global community. "Mobilizing Global Knowledge" brings together academics and practitioners to reflect on a global collaborative refugee research network. Together, the members of this network have had a wide-ranging impact on research and policy, working to bridge silos, sectors, and regions. They have addressed power and politics in refugee research, engaged across tensions between the Global North and Global South, and worked deeply with questions of practice, methodology, and ethics in refugee research. Bridging scholarship on network building for knowledge production and scholarship on research with and about refugees, "Mobilizing Global Knowledge" brings together a vibrant collection of topics and perspectives. It addresses ethical methods in research practice, the possibilities of social media for data collection and information dissemination, environmental displacement, transitional justice, and more. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how to create and share knowledge to the benefit of the millions of people around the world who have been forced to flee their homes."--

In 2018, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees documented a record high 71.4 million displaced people around the world. As states struggle with the costs of providing protection to so many people and popular conceptions of refugees have become increasingly politicized and sensationalized, researchers have come together to form regional and global networks dedicated to working with displaced people to learn how to respond to their needs ethically, compassionately, and for the best interests of the global community. Mobilizing Global Knowledge brings together academics and practitioners to reflect on a global collaborative refugee research network. Together, the members of this network have had a wide-ranging impact on research and policy, working to bridge silos, sectors, and regions. They have addressed power and politics in refugee research, engaged across tensions between the Global North and Global South, and worked deeply with questions of practice, methodology, and ethics in refugee research. Bridging scholarship on network building for knowledge production and scholarship on research with and about refugees, Mobilizing Global Knowledge brings together a vibrant collection of topics and perspectives. It addresses ethical methods in research practice, the possibilities of social media for data collection and information dissemination, environmental displacement, transitional justice, and more. This is essential reading for anyone interested in how to create and share knowledge to the benefit of the millions of people around the world who have been forced to flee their homes.

"This book takes the reader from the university lab to the playgrounds of communities. It shows how to integrate, move and use knowledge, an action journey within an identified action space that is called knowledge mobilization"--Jacket.

How can educational research have more impact? What processes of knowledge exchange are most effective for increasing the uses of research results? How can research-produced knowledge be better ‘mobilized’ among users such as practicing educators, policy makers, and the public communities? These sorts of questions are commanding urgent attention in educational discourses and research policies now circulating around the world. This attention has been translated into powerful material exercises that shape what is considered to be worthwhile research and how research is funded, recognized, and assessed. Yet precisely what activities constitute effective knowledge mobilization, or even what is meant by ‘moving knowledge’, remains unclear. What politics are at play in determining knowledge ‘impact’ across radically different contexts? Who determines what counts as impact, and for what purposes? How are ‘results’ of educational research separated from its participants and processes? In addition knowledge mobilization also invokes debates about the languages through which knowledge is constructed, policy processes are enacted, and research unfolds. This volume is unique in bringing together these wide-ranging issues of knowledge mobilization in education. The volume editors critically analyse these complex issues and also describe various efforts of knowledge mobilization and their effects. While the contributors themselves speak from diverse material, occupational and theoretical locations. Leading scholars in Canada, the US, the UK, and Australia bring disciplinary perspectives from law, digital media studies, museum studies, journalism and policy-making as well as fields of education. Some speak from Anglo-‘Western’ perspectives but others such as Phan Le Ha (Vietnamese), Rui Yang (Chinese) and Dolores van der Wey (Haida/West Coat Salish First Nations) speak from Asian, Indigenous and diasporic locations.

This edited volume advances existing research on the production and use of expert knowledge by international bureaucracies. Given the complexity, technicality and apparent apolitical character of the issues dealt with in global governance arenas, ‘evidence-based’ policy-making has imposed itself as the best way to evaluate the risks and consequences of political action in global arenas. In the absence of alternative, democratic modes of legitimation, international organizations have adopted this approach to policy-making. By treating international bureaucracies as strategic actors, this volume address novel questions: why and how do international bureaucrats deploy knowledge in policy-making? Where does the knowledge they use come from, and how can we retrace pathways between the origins of certain ideas and their adoption by international administrations? What kind of evidence do international bureaucrats resort to, and with what implications? Which types of knowledge are seen as authoritative, and why? This volume makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the way global policy agendas are shaped and propagated. It will be of great interest to scholars, policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of public policy, international relations, global governance and international organizations.

The essays presented in this volume examine knowledge mobilisation and its relation to research impact and engagement. The social sciences matter because they can help us to understand and address the complex challenges confronting society. This is particularly true in an era of significant downward pressure on public expenditure, a consequence of the global fiscal crisis, when there is a striking need to ensure that policies are demonstrably effective and efficient. The impact agenda in the UK, reflected in parallel global debates, actively encourages the social sciences to make and demonstrate a difference; to justify and protect social science funding. This volume shows how knowledge mobilisation can be thought of systematically as a process, encompassing engagement, leading to the co-production and channelling of knowledge to make a difference in the economy and society. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

The Knowledge Translation Toolkit provides a thorough overview of what knowledge translation (KT) is and how to use it most effectively to bridge the "know-do" gap between research, policy, practice, and people. It presents the theories, tools, and strategies required to encourage and enable evidence-informed decision-making. This toolkit builds upon extensive research into the principles and skills of KT: its theory and literature, its evolution, strategies, and challenges. The book covers an array of crucial KT enablers--from context mapping to evaluative thinking--supported by practical examples, implementation guides, and references. Drawing from the experience of specialists in relevant disciplines around the world, The Knowledge Translation Toolkit aims to enhance the capacity and motivation of researchers to use KT and to use it well. The Tools in this book will help researchers ensure that their good science reaches more people, is more clearly understood, and is more likely to lead to positive action. In sum, their work becomes more useful, and therefore, more valuable.

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.