Knowledge, power and practice : investigating the Roundtable

The spaces in which knowledge, people and practices come together are changing, raising questions about who produces knowledge, what knowledge is and how knowledge is produced. These questions signal that relations of power permeate knowledge practices, but the way power relations influence the kind of knowledge that gets produced and the way these relations work to reproduce or resist existing power structures in newer knowledge production configurations, often go unexamined. Through a case study of an Australian based cross-sector knowledge sharing entity – the Technology and Wellbeing Roundtable – I ask a series of questions about the status of contemporary knowledge production. Firstly, how do economic, commercial and organisational demands influence the contemporary production of knowledge? Secondly, in the context of these demands, to what extent do knowledge practices operate to reproduce existing power arrangements? Thirdly, what are the affective and embodied social processes within knowledge practices that resist these power arrangements? And what alternatives and imaginaries can these social processes offer to successful knowledge sharing in environments that increasingly conflate information with knowledge? Finally, and perhaps most critically, what types of relations need to be considered and encouraged in contemporary knowledge production, especially when thinking about its future trajectory. Despite the increased influence of economic and organisational demands and the pressures to assess knowledge based on commodification and competitive principles, the research in this thesis evidences that people proactively seek ways to demystify and resist these versions of knowledge production. In doing so they create knowledge sharing platforms where they can experience and create social connections with others and engage with contentious issues in ways that are reflexive and enable modes of ‘being together’ while also acknowledging and working with difference and conflict. These relations, I argue, are the ones that need to be encouraged in the face of those power antagonisms of neoliberal knowledge production which work to homogenise, separate and smooth over difference, whilst also silently inscribing the economisation of knowledge into all sharing practices. This thesis approaches these questions by attending to the practices though which knowledge is shared, produced and moved in relation to the Technology and Wellbeing Roundtable. It acknowledges that an analysis of contemporary knowledge production presents unique problems that are not easily answerable using the tools and methods that are conventionally available to researchers. As such I use an ‘inventive’ approach (Lury & Wakeford, 2012) to methods that embraces a varied and open-ended journey of inquiry to include many accounts, iterations, documentations, descriptions and representations of the data that I encountered. The Technology and Wellbeing Roundtable is a multifaceted and dynamic entity, and examining it brought the politics of the representation of data and complex social relations to the fore. Finding ways to sufficiently surface and examine the complexity of power, knowledge sharing, and practice meant using diverse forms to document and examine the Roundtable. Some of these forms, such as network analysis, proved inadequate to bring the complexity of this entity into focus, and highlighted the critical need for deeply textured accounts of contemporary knowledge production. These textured accounts can problematise contemporary knowledge production practices that rely on and reproduce the instrumentalisation of knowledge and, in doing so, create the space for accounting for the critical role of people, sociality and affect in knowledge production. In this thesis I argue that to understand the contemporary state of knowledge production, scholars need to undertake a critical examination of the commercialisation of knowledge and a heightened interest in the movement of information. I argue that an increased focus on the social processes of knowledge sharing, which also embrace alternative forms of knowledge, can help attend to relations of power that conflate information with knowledge, as knowledge is being produced. This approach also provides richer, more detailed understandings of the ways knowledge is shared, and surfaces those knowledge production practices which resist the sharing and creation of knowledge only for commercialisation. It is here that this thesis makes an original contribution. This thesis highlights the role of affect, resistance and reflexivity in knowledge sharing through the case study of the Technology and Wellbeing Roundtable, as a successful knowledge sharing group, pinpointing ways that the Roundtable’s practices can be enhanced. Knowledge sharing is not simply the exchange or transmission of information; it extends into the affective, embodied social processes in which people are located. Future studies of knowledge sharing need to recognise and examine the centrality of these processes in the way knowledge is produced in order to emphasise, encourage and maintain those relations that work productively with complexity, rather than smoothing it over. Drawing out the emergent socialites of knowledge sharing, may highlight conflict, difference, disagreements, ambiguities and emotions, but these are central to how knowledge is produced and neglecting them will result in thin, homogenous accounts adding little to our understanding of the contemporary state of knowledge production