Advanced Studies of Knowledge
Advanced Studies of Knowledge
Knowledge is everywhere. It is not only something that is developed and spread by scientists, scholars, and teachers. It is also produced, contracted, absorbed, and forgotten in our daily lives, in all practices where we work, learn, recreate, care, love, and take offence. In the research group of Advanced Studies of Knowledge, we are exactly interested in the broadest possible understanding of what knowledge is, with a special interest for knowledges that are less commonly seen as such. How do craftspeople know their craft? How does practical knowledge come about and circulate? How do traditional and indigenous knowledges fit or misfit modern-Western scientific paradigms, and how does this lead to the just or unjust inclusion and exclusion of those knowledges? How do non-knowledge and ignorance work, how can we study them if they seem to be essentially ‘something missing’, and how are they possibly different from plain stupidity or nonsense? How does knowledge operate differently once it becomes monetized or appropriated? How do art forms produce, transform and transact knowledge?
Our research focuses on the production, circulation, consumption and destruction of all sorts of knowledge. The research takes the broadest possible approach to knowledge and ignorance, where the boundary of investigation is not set at any pre-defined notions of knowledge and ignorance, but at what actors define as such. We tap into philosophy, grounded theory, anthropology, practice theory, sociology and more generally the heterogeneous methods from science and technology studies broadly construed.
We irregularly organize lunch seminars where ‘other’ forms of knowledge are central.
Current projects
The project studies governance and management of risk in information societies from the perspective of 'epistemic justice'. Epistemic justice is the idea that not all sorts of knowledge are given the same possibilities to speak, and effort is needed to distribute this speaking power more fairly. Especially formal expertise, coming from academic and otherwise certified knowledge producers, has a natural tendency to dominate debates, and governance and management processes. Notwithstanding the value of such expertise, this may entail that other valuable sorts of knowledge fail to get included in management and governance processes. The project will deliver insights that help improve innovation and governance in information societies by mobilizing a broader range of knowledges than is currently the case.
Project leader: Govert Valkenburg (NTNU)
Project members: Govert Valkenburg (NTNU); Sofia Moratti (NTNU); Maja Urbanczyk (NTNU)
Funding: The Research Council of Norway
Duration: 2020-2024
A PhD Project by Maja Urbanczyk about non-knowledge and ignorance in (political) decision-making processes regarding the societal introduction of software is part of the RCN-funded Research Project EpiJustInf: Risk in the information society: towards epistemic justice, led by Govert Valkenburg, that will be conducted until 2024.
The project explores the impact and agency of non-knowledge and ignorance in decision-making processes, including negotiations between different stakeholders with different knowledge sets and in different power positions. The studied decision-making processes are tied to the introduction of software, which shall be introduced to and used by public user groups. One of the study's specific examples is the decision-making process around the introduction of Corona Contact Tracing Apps in 2020.
RRI workpackage on knowledge production in a heterogeneous situation with both commercial and academic interests
Researcher project funded by the Research Council of Norway
Project leader Vidar R. Jensen, UiB
Duration: 2022-2027
Publications
Democracy requires some sort of exchange of knowledge between holders of different knowledge positions. The concept of epistemic justice brings the ability to know and the right to be recognised as a knowledgeable person under a scheme of justice. It problematises social conditions that potentially compromise the ability to share knowledge and thereby effectuate change and the possibility of being recognised as a knowing subject and being granted access to equitable means of producing knowledge. This paper engages with temporal aspects of epistemic justice. What role do temporalities play in people’s possibilities to create knowledge and the way they create knowledge? What role does time play in the valuation and circulation of knowledges? How do hegemonic conceptions of time potentially make some knowledges circulate more freely than others? Since conceptions of time connect to specific forms of knowledge, hierarchies and speakabilities of temporalities form an immediate correlate of hierarchies of knowledge. By extension, such hierarchies feed into schemes of epistemic justice. Thus, democracy’s duty to emancipate suppressed voices requires emancipating the times from which those suppressed voices speak.
Valkenburg, G. (2022). Temporality in epistemic justice. Time & Society, 31(3), 437–454. DOI: 10.1177/0961463X221094699
