Bridging Knowledge Cultures: The Knowledge for Change Global Consortium on Training Community-Based Participatory Research (hereafter BKC) is a global research project led by the UNESCO Chair in Community-Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education. Between 2017 and 2022, twelve Knowledge for Change (K4C) Hubs from nine different countries made original contributions to the BKC project: Colombia, Canada (Salish Sea), India (Jaipur and Raipur), Malaysia (USM and Mizan), Indonesia (Surabaya), Italy (Sassari), South Africa (North and Durban), Tanzania (Nyerere), Uganda (Gulu). Our work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
A basic function of higher education institutions is to use different means of producing knowledge. One such way is through research partnerships with external stakeholders such as community organizations. To date, partnership research has expanded remarkably across the globe as an effective approach to the co-creation of knowledge. Building mutually beneficial partnerships though is not easy, and expressions of power inequalities, such as issues related to structures and processes, roles and relationships, artefacts and discourses, partnership configurations and transformations over time, and partners’ identities and status, persist. While we have reached a stage of maturity in understanding benefits of collaboration between diverse knowledge actors from different knowledge systems with their own cultures and incentive structures, few studies have addressed the more analytical and practical questions around power relationship in community-university research partnerships. The central research question that guides the BKC project thus is: In establishing trusting and respectful community-university research partnerships, how can diverse knowledge cultures be bridged so that extant power inequalities between collaborating partners are taken into consideration to make these connections sustainable and secure over time?
We define knowledge culture as a negotiated and temporally and locally bound set of practices, expressed in arrangements, mechanisms, and value-beliefs and compelled by necessity, affinity and/or historical coincidence, and which, in a given area of professional expertise, make up how each K4C hub knows what it knows and how knowledge is created.
Key findings
- Community knowledge (culture) is located within ‘main business of life’, while academic knowledge culture is located within ‘main business of knowledge’. Everyday life is the site for practice of community knowledge. Community knowledge is place-based, contextual, contemporary and practical, while academic knowledge is preoccupied with generalisations and in search of universal truths.
- Everyday rituals, symbols, languages and practices ‘curate’ community knowledge. Inner understanding of meanings, feelings and norms are essential to make sense of community knowledge. Community protocols for validation of knowledge are based on principles of cooperation (not competition), culturally resonant ethics (not procedural and bureaucratic), and responding to changes in the ‘business of life’ (not pre-determined and permanent).
- Contrary to popular imputations, community knowledge is not stagnant or ancient or traditional; it changes with time, over time, is a dynamic response to changes in the immediate and larger socio-ecological contexts (e.g., forced migration, dams, bridges, mines, factories built around communities). Community knowledge is both pragmatic and normative at the same time. Values of the community and the surrounding eco-system shape the internal validation of knowledge being produced, stored and shared.
- Acceptance and acknowledgement of community knowledge as legitimate is the critical first step in facilitating a bridge between community knowledge and academic knowledge. The foundation of the bridge is laid upon the acceptance and acknowledgement of community knowledge as legitimate and different by academics.
- Relationships of trust are the cement for bridging the two knowledge cultures. Once experiential knowledge of people living in communities, ancient land-based knowledge of Indigenous Peoples and the epistemic privilege of those experiencing lives of poverty, different abilities, homelessness, and more, are recognized as legitimate, the challenge is to move beyond the traditional walls of academia to establish relations of mutual respect. Building such relationships of trust takes time and investment but is essential for meaningful research partnerships.
- When academics ’learn’ to listen (and resist from talking), with not just words but emotions behind them, relationships begin to develop. Rebalancing feelings (and less thinking) supports relationship building. This process entails time, requires patience and happens gradually over time. When academics ‘unlearn’ self-indulgence, mutuality occurs. The capacity to cope with distress and anxiety caused by such ‘unlearning’ helps build the next step towards the bridge.
- The capacity of academics to accept oral storage and transmission of community knowledge, and their openness towards non-written forms of documentation and records as legitimate sources of knowledge, help to support the arch of scaffolding of the bridge. Academic researchers demonstrating a capacity to understand stories and anecdotes as types of data further helps the process of bridge-building.
- Given the cultural, linguistic and status differentials between academics and communities, an effective mediation process helps to kick-off bridging. There is a critical role for interlocutors, boundary-spanners and intermediaries, who may well come from either or both the community and academic side. Such facilitator functions need to be performed creatively and contextually. The accountability of these mediators to both the community and academia needs to be operationalised and demonstrated.
- The creation of visible structures within the academia is key to supporting the transition from disciplinary academic-led knowledge creation to interdisciplinary co-construction of knowledge with community. Administrative structures within universities provide spaces for the recognition of on-going co-structured research projects, for sharing tools and strategies for doing community-based research work and for tracking impact. Likewise, spaces for shared leadership, analysis of findings and planning of action within research projects need to be attended to intentionally so that needs and priorities of community partners are respected and responded to.
- K4C Hubs facilitated by the UNESCO Chair are becoming privileged sites for bridging the community and academic knowledge cultures. K4C Hubs are acting as bridges by providing a safe space for conversations about differences between the two (or more) knowledge cultures. They provide a platform for sharing emerging learnings about challenges in bridging the different knowledge cultures and ways to deal with them. Therefore, K4C Hubs represent transitional spaces towards the movement for the decolonisation of knowledge, and its democratisation.