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This is a call for papers for the Spring 2011 issue of the Anthropology Matters Journal.


Knowledge Transfer: Exchanging Knowledge with the Field
 
It has become increasingly important that academics seek to show the utility of academic knowledge.  Academia must provide evidence that its research outputs have applicability beyond the confines of the university. Indeed, universities now facilitate academics’ engagement with the public, policy-makers, and other stakeholder groups through knowledge-transfer activities.  Knowledge-transfer has become part of what makes a good proposal in such a way that it could be said that external demand now shapes the outputs of the university. What acts as a driver for these aims? What benefits and disadvantages do they bring?  Do people, institutions, and organisations in different fields around world share the same concerns?  Must knowledge always be useful?
 
This call for papers asks for contributions to Anthropology Matters that explore knowledge-transfer in its widest possible sense.  Knowledge-transfer might be explored in terms of shared academic knowledge, shared understandings, emotional exchanges, fostered relations, visual depictions and practical engagement.  In particular, contributions could explore the way in which knowledge is shared and exchanged in fields other than the university, and the form that it takes.  What new insights do such exchanges bring to formal Euro-American knowledge-transfer activities?  Kotthoff (1995) writes that in Kyrgyzstan, celebratory ‘toasts [….] deal with a specific kind of knowledge-transfer, namely that of values and shared moral concepts’.  Examining knowledge-sharing in the small village of Bolivip in Papua New Guinea, Crook (2009) states, ‘Bolivip imagines knowledge as the bodily resources or parts of a person that can be extended or combined with others’ in a way that challenges the notion that knowledge travels between persons as a thing.
 
What are the vehicles of knowledge-transfer—documents, texts, persons, bodies, buildings, legal instruments—and how are these effectively manipulated?  Whilst the university might consider that the document is the most effective form of knowledge transfer, how might knowledge travel both within the university and elsewhere? Some argue there is benefit in understanding the subjective nature of the document—that is, of perceiving the social relations that constitute both its creation and reception (Riles 2006).  In this sense, more information does not necessarily bring more knowledge, rather knowledge depends on the connections that those receiving information can make between documents and their sociable origins—or those persons who hold and originate them (O’Neill 2002).
 
What are the practical and ethical concerns embedded in knowledge transfer?  As socially gathered knowledge is perceived as ‘fact’, does the anthropologist have to contend with the authority of the ethnographic text?  Must an anthropologist think about with whom or how to share his or her ethnographic findings, and does he or she run the risk of (mis)representing his or her informant in the process? Or can sharing knowledge make visible an anthropologist’s own personal interests and particular relations, as well as those of their field informants—and with what kind of consequences?  Does the anthropologist have a moral and ethical obligation to share what they know with field informants?  If so, how are such practical and ethical issues overcome?
 
This issue of Anthropology Matters welcomes articles from postgraduates and early career anthropologists that consider knowledge-transfer activities in their broadest sense. Please send a brief abstract to Gemma John at [log in to unmask] by 14th June 2010.

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