Call
for Papers: Knowing Development - Developing Knowledge?
2nd Nordic Conference for
Development Research
Deadline for abstracts: 3. June 2013!
The role of knowledge production in and for
development has been under increasing scrutiny. The questions
such as “does development aid really work?” or “is there value
for the money?” are continuously posed by donors as well as
politicians and the general public. The pressures for showing
results, outcomes and impacts have grown under the trends such
as result-based management and evidence-based decision making.
These international trends have been under debate in the
Nordic countries as well and tackled in different ways in
their development policies and strategies. The search for more
systematic knowledge production in terms of monitoring,
evaluation and impact assessment has been evident in
multilateral, bilateral, and non-governmental development
cooperation. At the same time, there has been increasing
multidisciplinary debate on the methodologies of knowledge
production in such endeavors. The debates have been
experimental, participatory and other methodologies have
echoed the disciplinary boundaries and general epistemological
underpinnings within the multidisciplinary field of
development research. In addition to these methodological
debates, an increasing body of ethnographic research and
theoretical accounts on the knowledge practices, forms of
indigenous knowledge, and the knowledge-power configuration in
development has been published. Reflecting on such trends and
challenges as identified above, which are relating to
cooperation and support for ‘development’ within the framework
of global governance, requires again to explore the notion of
development and the concept(s) of development studies and
research. We remain concerned with the question of what
development research is able to offer for policy makers and
agencies.
The Second Nordic Conference for
Development Research provides a platform for researchers,
government representatives and NGO-practitioners to address
the dilemmas of knowledge production in and for development.
The conference aims at dialogue between different
methodologies and discussion on their potentialities and
limitations in addressing the riddles of intended change,
which is at the heart of the development practice.
The conference invites submissions of
abstracts to the working groups. The list and
descriptions of the working groups can be found at the
conference website:
http://www.kehitystutkimus.fi/conference/working-groups.
Submit your abstract to the working group
you wish to present your paper. Please do not submit an
abstract to more than one group. The abstract should be
written in English with no more than 500 words. The abstract
should include a title of the paper, the name and affiliation
of the author(s) and their contact emails immediately after
the title.
The abstracts should be sent as a word
document or .rtf file named as: author_WG_number (for example:
Ulenius_WG_24).
Submit your abstract directly to the workshop
coordinators of the working group and copy it to:
[log in to unmask].