Research Shifts
Communities as Partners in Knowledge: Building Social Trust and Meaningful Partnerships throughout the Research Process
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mary Goitom, Shamette Hepburn
A critical aspect of community-based participatory research (CBPR) and decolonial practice in research is the engagement of community members throughout the research process inclusive of the forging of a meaningful partnership in the knowledge generation and dissemination process. However, when working with historically marginalized communities where mistrust of researchers and/or the knowledge generation process may exist because of past and/or present social injustices, developing social trust is a necessary component at every stage of the process. Through a series of critical reflections coupled with a succession of exchanges with communities, as community practitioners and community engaged researchers, we have been able to develop a process for community engagement and dissemination that involves critically reflexive questions we ask ourselves as researchers embarking on the process of engaging diverse communities as partners in knowledge. This paper details the critically reflexive questions that inform our praxis with transnational immigrant communities in Canada spanning three continents (North America, Africa and Asia). Specifically, this paper will discuss the key themes and core strategies we have employed in our work for developing trust, the co-creation of flexible dissemination plans, being receptive to and learning from criticism, and implementing input from community members to name a few. Ultimately, the essence of this paper is to convey that the theory and practice of scholarly communication cannot be limited to performative action and abstract propagandizing if they are to truly reflect individual, communal and societal diversity for the purposes of generating impactful modes of social knowledge production.
Academics' and Students' Meanings of Social Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jevgenija Sivoronova, Aleksejs Vorobjovs
The authors investigate the problem of social media as a knowledge source, considering its significance in constructing social knowledge and translating the meanings. They use the epistemological attitude theory to approach the issue through an interdisciplinary humanities and social science viewpoint. Epistemological attitude theory supposes cognition as the process between an individual and an object occurring in subjective, contextual, and epistemological dimensions. This theory allows exploring social media sources as social knowledge represented as meanings reflected by an individual's consciousness. Sixty-six university academics, including lecturers and researchers, and one hundred and two students from various universities in Latvia participated in the study. The study used the Epistemological Attitude Towards Sources of Knowledge Questionnaire to investigate how respondents approach, employ, and value social media as the general source type. The results were obtained by conducting confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses, statistical criteria, and correlation analysis. The results deliver academics' and students' epistemological and psychological meanings of social media. Exemplifying profiles of the significance of the source, the differences between both groups are analysed, illustrating how social media is represented in academics' and students' consciousness. The findings reveal that scholars and students perceive social media differently, prescribing distinct epistemological values to its content. Also, they hold different approaches to translating the meaning in their communities. At the same time, both acknowledge the psychological importance. Finally, the authors summarise that these meanings reflect the need for social knowledge obtained by social media and participating in its creation that simultaneously shapes social cognition.
Knowledgeable or Publishable?: Navigating Tension Between Creative Writing Academic and Commercial Publishing Spheres
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jay Ludowyke
In creative writing doctoral degrees, candidates must produce a creative artefact, a publishable written work, alongside an exegesis, a dissertation that explicates their research’s original contribution to knowledge. These degree programs cultivate application of this original knowledge within the creative artefact and can result in avant-garde works. However, there is tension between the concepts of ‘original knowledge’ and ‘publishable’. The manifestation of original knowledge, that is, the experimentation and innovation that hallmark creative writing artefacts, may be deemed unpublishable, or at least unpalatable, from a commercial trade publishing perspective. Yet, after attaining their degree, the secondary goal of doctoral candidates is to publish their creative artefact. How then do they navigate this tension? The requirements to re-write academic research dissertations for the general public are well established, but this question has not been considered in a creative research context. Three case studies are presented that examine the transition of creative artifacts as they travel from research to commercial publishing systems: a narrative history creative artefact called ‘Thia’ written by Jay Ludowyke and published by Hachette as Carpathia: The Extraordinary Story of the Ship that Rescued the Survivors of the Titanic; the award-winning historical fiction creative artefact ‘Garrison Town’ written by Melanie Myers and published by Queensland University Press as Meet me at Lennon’s; and a young adult creative artefact ‘Silencing the Voices’ written by Sara Hutchinson with themes that have resisted publication. Together, these cases unveil the dynamics shaping the dissemination of narrative innovative within academic and commercial spheres.
