Agenda for the future
[chapter]
Budd L. Hall, Edward T. Jackson, Rajesh Tandon, Jean-Marc Fontan, Nirmala Lall
2019
Knowledge, democracy and action
As partners in the study that led to the creation of this book, we are encouraged by what we see as increased visibility for a knowledge democracy movement. In this volume, we have documented the emergence of new practices and new theory that highlight the relationship of knowledge and its construction to issues of local and global social justice. Community-university research partnerships can be critically important locations of transformative energy in the larger effort to understand and use
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... nowledge and its construction and co-construction in ways that are authentically linked to the struggles of everyday people for a better world. The global neo-liberal economic agenda that has produced a kind of market utopia has been supported by a canon of western, largely male, elite knowledge systems and practices. As the failure of the global market to close the gaps between the rich and poor or provide a platform for more democratic citizen engagement becomes clearer every day, we are thinking of ways to decolonize knowledge, to rupture and allow new light into the liberal knowledge canon and to give visibility and respect to the knowledge of those historically excluded. We recognize that, as knowledge is of critical importance to the continuation of dominant relations of power, challenging our understandings of the role of knowledge and its uses will be an arena of contestation. We are ready. Indeed, we are already deeply engaged in that contest. And we know that hundreds of thousands of people in literally every community of the globe have, as African-American civil rights leaders once said, their eyes on the prize. The prize, of course, is a more just, sustainable, joyful and loving world. Based what we have learned from on our work together in this project, we offer our thoughts on an agenda for the future. Emergence of a new architecture of knowledge: beyond experiments and pilot projects Our study provides evidence that, at a global level, we are moving from the tradition of engaged scholarship based largely on the work of a number of committed individual scholars and their personal connections to community to a new, institutional approach. This new phase is characterized by the creation of many centres, some wholly located in communities themselves, and new structures to enable the generation, facilitation and sustainability of community university research
doi:10.7765/9781526137081.00038
fatcat:qkujfl6devg5rmexa5zdbdj6xu