Knowledge Democracy

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://knowledgedemocracydspace.com/handle/123456789/1076

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Start date: 1990End date: 1997

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Higher education, the politics of knowledge and the challenges of popular education and social movements
    (1993) Hall, Budd L
    Dr. Budd L. Hall reflects on the politics of knowledge in higher education, drawing on his own experiences across adult education, participatory research, and academic life. The paper departs from conventional academic arguments. It moves through personal narrative and engagement with other scholars to examine how universities continue to decide what counts as legitimate knowledge. Hall grounds these reflections in specific encounters from his career, particularly the 1991 Paulo Freire Birthday Conference in New York, where a question from a Latina community educator pushed him to rethink how universities relate to the communities they claim to serve. He traces participatory research back to challenges against positivist paradigms in adult education and international development research, noting that even as the field gains recognition inside universities, systems of tenure, promotion, and academic reward continue to favor individual scholarship over collaborative and community-rooted work. Eco-feminist, cultural-historical, and adult education voices, including Vandana Shiva, Mechtild Hart, and Edmund Sullivan, widen the critique further. Hall also points to community-based research centres, PRIA among them, and popular education networks across Latin America as spaces sustaining knowledge outside university walls, closing with a call to reinvent the academy in more democratic and non-extractive terms
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    Knowledge participation and empowerment
    (1997-11) Tandon, Rajesh
    The article by Dr. Rajesh Tandon talks about the practices of participatory research as a philosophy of subaltern knowledge systems. He states how historically, knowledge systems have been dominated by elites who maintain hegemonic control over them while negating the perspectives of marginalized people, and defines participatory research as an alternative process and method. The article goes on to trace the origins of participatory research to the practice of Adult Educators in poor communities of Asia, Africa, and Latin America and lists networks promoted by organizations that became the breeding ground for experiments in participatory research. Dr. Tandon further mentions PRIA (Participatory Research in Asia) and documents its evolution and interventions in the work of participatory research in various fields like environment, workers' education, occupational health, and women’s issues. The article ends by identifying challenges in the form of bureaucratic state institutions, statism, and emerging technologies, also placing emphasis on the role of adult education to help citizens regain their capacities.
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    Civil society and construction of knowledge systems
    (Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), 1997-06-01) Tondon, Rajesh
    Modern systems of knowledge have largely been shaped by the state and the market, yet both have left little room for the lived realities of ordinary people. This paper positions civil society as a third arena in which knowledge is generated, one grounded not in abstract theory but in everyday practice, collective memory, and problem-solving. It argues that knowledge forms such as oral, experiential, intergenerational etc, are vital to understanding social life, even as they remain marginalized by formal institutions. By contrasting these dynamics with the dominant knowledge systems of state and corporate actors, the study opens up new questions about how knowledge is produced, legitimized, and used in society.
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    The Historical roots and contemporary tendencies in participatory research: Implications for health care
    (1996) Tandon, Rajesh
    This chapter by Dr. Rajesh Tandon, it focuses on researching the notion of participatory research that has been developing for quite a long time. It refers to such movements as the sociology of knowledge, the adult education in the South, Paulo Freire’s popular education, action research, phenomenology, and participatory development. The chapter discusses that participatory research was developed to oppose to the dominant research the statements about neutrality, objectivity, separation between the subject and object of research, and quantitative approach. The chapter notes that participatory research focuses on participation, experience, action, reflection, and recognition of the oppressed. It underlines that participatory research in health aims to contribute to a holistic understanding of health and illness, including the role of people’s lifestyle and everyday life, to recognize the importance of indigenous knowledge and approaches, and to promote their visibility. It reveals that participatory research in health tries to give access to knowledge and empower both laymen and marginalized groups as well as to contribute to a democratic and equitable society by seeking to challenge who owns what we know about health, science, and the health sector in general.