From Stakeholders to Joint Knowledge Production Partners
Vaia Doudaki
& Nico Carpentier
Abstract
Academic research involving societal partners often approaches the latter as less knowledgeable, not possessing the skills and authority that the academic field has in producing legitimate knowledge. Still, several (academic) traditions have engaged in practices that destabilise the notion of the academia as the exclusive field of knowledge production, albeit not without inconsistencies between theory and practice. Building on this tradition, this article addresses the need to involve societal partners in the start-up phases of projects that aim for participatory knowledge production. Using (autho)ethnography this article reflects on the start-up phase of a research project on environmental communication, which involves a wide range of societal actors. It critically evaluates the participatory intensities of the start-up phase process which involved a series of collaborative decisions on how to structure participation, and reports on the outcomes of this process, namely a set of guiding principles and a toolkit aiming to foster and enable participation.
Keywords
joint knowledge production; participation; power dynamics; societal partners; environmental communication
Doudaki, Vaia & Carpentier, Nico. (2021). From Stakeholders to Joint Knowledge Production Partners. Conjunctions. Transdisciplinary Journal of Cultural Participation. 8. 10.7146/tjcp.v8i1.121109.
Conceptualization of Change
Kristýna Kopřivová
, Nico Carpentier
& Vaia Doudaki
Abstract
“Conceptualization of Change” is a 12-minute film that provides a theoretical reflection on the signifier “change”, and its five dimensions: Normativity, Scale and Intensity, Focus, Control and Time. Filmed in Prague, with the integration of archive material that is mostly related to the 1989 Velvet Revolution, the essay unpacks the significatory complexity of change, mapping the diversity of meanings that have been allocated to this notion. The film’s five chapters organize a dialogue between fast-paced and still poetic imaginaries and voice-overs, starting with the normativity of change, and its utopian and dystopian meanings. The Scale and Intensity chapter reflects on the sometimes minute and sometimes all-encompassing nature of change, combined with its hegemonic and counter-hegemonic roles. The Focus chapter deals with the autonomy and dependency of change, while the Control chapter focusses on how change can be controlled and controlling. Finally, the Time chapter brings in differences between process and outcome, and patterns and events. Analytically and methodologically, the film uses a post-structuralist paradigm to assist theory formation, grounded in, and combined with, an analysis of the content produced for the Mediating Change Colloquium, that took place in Prague on 20 and 21 November 2020. To render this source of inspiration and analysis visible, the film starts with a one-minute preamble, including a selection of voices from this Colloquium, in order to then shift to a more general theoretical discussion on change, with its five dimensions.
Keywords
Change, Constructionism, Signification, Audiovisual essay, Fluidity, Conflict
Kopřivová, K., Carpentier, N., & Doudaki, V. (2023). Conceptualization of Change. Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 15(1), 50-61. https://doi.org/10.34632/jsta.2023.11674
Communicating Academic Knowledge Beyond the Written Academic Text: An Auto-Ethnographic Analysis of the Mirror Palace of Democracy Installation Experiment
Nico Carpentier
Abstract
The article first discusses five approaches that aim to transcend, complement, or overturn the hegemony of the written academic text. These five approaches are (1) the cluster of science communication, science popularization, and knowledge dissemination; (2) the cluster of knowledge exchange, and participatory, transformative, and interventionist (action) research; (3) multimodal academic communication; (4) the cluster of visual anthropology and visual sociology; and (5) arts-based research. As each approach deals with (overcoming) the hegemony of the written academic text differently, the first part of the article details these approaches. In the second part, the Mirror Palace of Democracy installation experiment, which had the explicit objective of moving beyond the written academic text while still remaining in the realm of academic knowledge communication, is autoethnographically analyzed. The experiment allowed reflection on the integrated and iterative nature of academic communication, on the hybrid academic–artistic identity, and on the diversification of publics. Both the theoretical discussion on the five approaches and the Mirror Palace of Democracy installation are part of a call for more experimentation with, and theorization of, multimodal and/or arts-based academic communication.
Keywords
academic communication, multimodal scholarship, arts-based research, installation art, democracy, representation, participation, contingency
Carpentier, N. (2020). Communicating Academic Knowledge Beyond the Written Academic Text: An Auto-Ethnographic Analysis of the Mirror Palace of Democracy Installation Experiment. International Journal Of Communication, 14, 24. Retrieved from https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/13438