Shared Knowledge

This book presents leading-edge analysis on the theory and practice of participatory evaluation around the world. With its instructive case studies from Bangladesh, El Salvador, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, Nepal, and St Vincent, the book is a guide to a community-based approach to evaluation that is at once a learning process, a means of taking action, and a catalyst for empowerment.Knowledge Shared is the most comprehensive book now available on participatory evaluation. It is intended primarily as a tool for practitioners and policymakers in all segments of development cooperatio.

A lot of people know a lot of stuff, and most of us don't get to share the best bits with other people. So this book gets together twenty-one recent graduates to share something they think you should know. Among other things you can learn: Why you should care about Japan's ageing population How a baby is made (after the fun bit) How the English and Scottish dealt with 'witches' Why we should think about disasters a bit differently How performance analysis works in sport Our editors graduated from university in 2008, during the last once in a lifetime financial armageddon. The idea behind this book was to allow recent graduates (who are hitting the real world a full twelve years after it went wrong last time) an opportunity to do something interesting with their time. Our experience tells us the next few years’ worth of graduates will spend a long time being called lazy and stupid for the crime of being born about twenty-one years before it all went pear-shaped. So, for our authors, at least, they will have something to point at that they have achieved to disprove that. But mostly we just wanted to get together twenty-one chapters worth of stuff we didn’t know before.

This volume brings together the experiences and research of heritage practitioners, archaeologists, and educators to explore new and unique approaches to heritage studies. The last several decades have witnessed a rapid increase in the field of cultural heritage studies worldwide. This increase in the number of studies and in interest by the public as well as academics has effected substantial change in the understanding of heritage and approaches to heritage studies. This change has also impacted the perception of communities, how to study and protect the physical residues of heritage, and how to share the knowledge of heritage. It has brought the issue of who has knowledge and how the value of heritage can be shared more effectively with communities who then ascribe meaning and value to heritage materials. Heritage studies, until a few decades ago, exclusively studied the material culture of the past as part of elitist approaches that completely neglected communities’ rights to knowledge of their own heritage. Additionally, heritage practitioners and archaeologists neither shared this knowledge nor engaged with communities about their heritage. Communities were also mostly deprived from contributing to heritage and archaeological studies. This kind of top-down approach was quite common in many parts of the world. But recent studies and research in the field have shown the importance of including the public in projects, and that sharing the knowledge produced through heritage studies and archaeological works is significant for the protection and preservation of heritage materials; it has finally been understood that excluding the public from heritage is not ethical. This publication presents a wide array of case studies with different approaches and methods from many parts of the world to answer these questions.

This book investigates the ways in which participants in political activities use micro-practices for solving issues of speaking, hearing and understanding as fundamental for the activities they engage in. Based on extensive video recordings of public meetings within a political grassroots project in the field of urbanism, it adopts a conversation analytic and ethnomethodological approach to social action, examining the use of interactional repair in processes of claiming, negotiating, contesting, distributing and establishing knowledge in public. As a study of the ways in which people interact in political meetings, address problems of intersubjectivity and manifest their understanding – or lack of understanding – of political talk, Establishing Shared Knowledge in Political Meetings sheds light on the relationship between interactional problems and political problems. It will thus appeal to scholars in sociology and political sciences with interests in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, social interaction, social order, and political practice.

Emphasizing the conflicts surrounding natural resource decision-making processes, this timely book presents practices that have been developed together with key stakeholders to improve the collection and utilization of locally relevant knowledge in land use planning. Chapters illustrate how indigenous and local knowledge (ILK) can be made spatially explicit by using, for example, participatory GIS.

What are the barriers in computer-mediated communication for cooperative learning and work? Based on empirical research, the chapters of this book offer different perspectives on the nature and causes of such barriers for students and researchers in the field.

A novel treatment of the capacity for shared attention, joint action, and perceptual common knowledge. In The Shared World, Axel Seemann offers a new treatment of the capacity to perceive, act on, and know about the world together with others. Seemann argues that creatures capable of joint attention stand in a unique perceptual and epistemic relation to their surroundings; they operate in an environment that they, through their communication with their fellow perceivers, help constitute. Seemann shows that this relation can be marshaled to address a range of questions about the social aspect of the mind and its perceptual and cognitive capacities. Seemann begins with a conceptual question about a complex kind of sociocognitive phenomenon—perceptual common knowledge—and develops an empirically informed account of the spatial structure of the environment in and about which such knowledge is possible. In the course of his argument, he addresses such topics as demonstrative reference in communication, common knowledge about jointly perceived objects, and spatial awareness in joint perception and action.