Living Knowledge Conference

"The UNESCO Chair in Community- Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education will be participating in the Living Knowledge Conference in Gdansk, Poland through its two verticals- Knowledge For Change (K4C) Global Consortium and the DECODE Knowledge Project. 

The K4C Global Coordinator, Dr Anshuman Karol, will lead a panel exploring how transnational solidarity within the Knowledge for Change (K4C) Consortium is practiced through collaborative governance, locally grounded learning methodologies, and community-engaged research ethics. Drawing on experiences across K4C hubs, the discussion will reflect on the realities of sustaining equitable global research networks, including challenges related to institutional inequalities, differing academic and community timelines, linguistic and cultural diversity, and tensions between academic and community priorities.

The panel will examine how K4C has responded to these challenges through decentralized leadership, shared values, reflexive learning spaces, and long-term trust-building. It will also highlight the K4C Mentor Training Programme (MTP), through which mentors from different regions are trained using a common framework that remains rooted in local contexts, enabling meaningful engagement, mutual learning, and solidarity in practice.

The conversation will further reflect on lessons for future research collaborations seeking to move beyond extractive or tokenistic partnerships, with particular emphasis on climate resilience, diverse knowledge systems, and network structures that support equitable and enduring collaboration.

Panellists:

Moderator: Dr Anshuman Karol — Global Coordinator, Knowledge for Change (K4C) Consortium

Andrea Vargiu — Director, Foist Laboratory for Social Policies and Formative Processes, University of Sassari; K4C Mentor, Sassari Hub

Rafeah Wahi — Associate Professor, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak; K4C Mentor, UNIMAS Hub

Giovanna Grossi — Associate Professor, Università degli Studi di Brescia; K4C Mentor, Brescia Hub

Alongside this, the DECODE Knowledge Project Manager, Olívia Andrade de Almeida, will moderate a problem-solving session focused on one of the key challenges emerging across the DECODE case studies: developing meaningful and locally relevant pathways for reporting research outcomes back to communities, while also enabling knowledge exchange beyond the immediate project context.

The session will examine how reporting-back processes are often shaped by academic conventions and funder requirements that privilege external audiences, producing outputs that circulate internationally but remain difficult to access or use locally, thereby weakening accountability within university–community partnerships.

Through facilitated comparative exercises, participants will engage with project materials from across DECODE cases to explore strategies for disseminating learnings back to communities in ways that are culturally grounded, actionable, and accessible. Discussions will focus on alternative reporting formats — oral, visual, low-tech, digital, or hybrid — and how these can remain adaptable, translatable, and resonant across different contexts and communities facing related challenges.

The session aims to generate practical outcomes, including a comparative matrix of reporting-back approaches across DECODE cases, a typology of adaptable formats, and a draft planning template to support intentional and ethical reporting-back practices from the outset of community-based research. These outputs will contribute to a practical DECODE resource designed to strengthen accountability, support peer learning, and inform future partnerships, projects, and funding strategies.