Global Knowledge Cultures provides a collection of accessible essays by some of the world’s leading legal scholars, new media analysts, techno activists, library professionals, educators and philosophers. Issues canvassed by the authors include the ownership of knowledge, open content licensing, knowledge policy, the common-wealth of learning, transnational cultural governance, and information futures.

Offering a dissenting perspective on the politics of knowledge, this book is a powerful critique of the intellectual and cultural assumptions that underline the current processes of development, modernization and globalization. The author demonstrates that the world as we know it today is understood largely through categories that are the product of Western knowledge systems. His critique of the existing world order and his vision of possible futures encourage the reader to engage in the study of the West. Rather than merely reversing Orientalism, such a study would create a body of knowledge about the West that would enable people to better understand both themselves and the West. This important and lucidly written book deconstructs the cultural assumptions that have emerged alongside capitalism and offers a devastating critique of the politics of knowledge at the heart of all powerbroking.

How the university went global and became the heart of the information age The university is experiencing an unprecedented level of success today, as more universities in more countries educate more students in more fields. At the same time, the university has become central to a knowledge society based on the belief that everyone can, through higher education, access universal truths and apply them in the name of progress. This book traces the university's rise over the past hundred years to become the cultural linchpin of contemporary society, revealing how the so-called ivory tower has become profoundly interlinked with almost every area of human endeavor. David John Frank and John Meyer describe how, as the university expanded, student and faculty bodies became larger, more diverse, and more empowered to turn knowledge into action. Their contributions to society underscored the public importance of scholarship, and as the cultural authority of universities grew they increased the scope of their research and teaching interests. As a result, the university has become the bedrock of today's information-based society, an institution that is now implicated in the solution to every conceivable problem. But, as Frank and Meyer also show, the conditions that helped spur the university's recent ascendance are not immutable: eruptions of nationalism, authoritarianism, and illiberalism undercut the university's universalistic and rationalistic premises, and may threaten the centrality of the university itself.

This is a major work by three international scholars at the cutting edge of new research that investigates the emerging set of complex relationships between creativity, design, research, higher education and knowledge capitalism. It highlights the role of the creative and expressive arts, of performance, of aesthetics in general, and the significant role of design as an underlying infrastructure for the creative economy. This book tracks the most recent mutation of these serial shifts - from postindustrial economy to the information economy to the digital economy to the knowledge economy to the 'creative economy' - to summarize the underlying and essential trends in knowledge capitalism and to investigate post-market notions of open source public space. The book hypothesizes that creative economy might constitute an enlargement of its predecessors that not only democratizes creativity and relativizes intellectual property law, but also emphasizes the social conditions of creative work. It documents how these profound shifts have brought to the forefront forms of knowledge production based on the commons and driven by ideas, not profitability per se; and have given rise to the notion of not just 'knowledge management' but the design of 'creative institutions' embodying new patterns of work.

‘Global’ knowledge was constructed, communicated and contested during the long nineteenth century in numerous ways and places. This book focuses on the life-geographies, material practices and varied contributions to knowledge, be they medical or botanical, cartographic or cultural, of actors whose lives crisscrossed an increasingly connected world. Integrating detailed archival research with broader thematic and conceptual reflection, the individual case studies use local specificity to shed light on global structures and processes, revealing the latter to be lived and experienced phenomena rather than abstract historiographical categories. This volume makes an original and compelling contribution to a growing body of scholarship on the global history of knowledge. Given its wide geographic, disciplinary and thematic range this book will appeal to a broad readership including historical geographers and specialists in history of science and medicine, imperial history, museum studies, and book history.

An innovative contribution to debates on the internationalization and globalization of the social sciences, this book pays particular attention to their theoretical and epistemological reconfiguration in the light of postcolonial critiques and critiques of Eurocentrism. Bringing together theoretical contributions and empirical case studies from around the world, including India, the Americas, South Africa, Australia and Europe, it engages in debates concerning public sociology and explores South-South research collaborations specific to the social sciences. Contributions transcend established critiques of Eurocentrism to make space for the idea of global social sciences and truly transnational research. Thematically arranged and both international and interdisciplinary in scope, this volume reflects the different theoretical and thematic backgrounds of the contributing authors, who enter into dialogue and debate with one another in the development of a more inclusive, more representative and more theoretically relevant stage for the social sciences. A rigorous critique of the contemporary state of the social sciences as well as an attempt to find another way of doing transnational sociology, Global Knowledge Production in the Social Sciences will appeal to scholars of sociology, political science and social theory with interests in the production of social scientific knowledge, postcolonialism and transnationalism in research.

The first serious, extended effort to use a human rights-based approach to address the scientific issues affecting society and the often-neglected human right to science.

This book investigates and critically interprets the underrepresentation of the global South in global knowledge production. The author analyses the serious bias towards scholars and institutions from this region: he argues that this phenomenon causes serious disadvantages not only for authors and institutions, but global science as well by impeding the flow of fresh, innovative scholarship. This book uses a combination of field theory and world-systems analysis to explain the motives and dynamics behind the geopolitical and societal inequalities in the system of global knowledge production. Subsequently, the author offers several solutions by which these inequalities could be reduced, or even eliminated. This book will be of interest and value to scholars of knowledge inequalities, and knowledge production in the global South. “Márton Demeter’s monograph invokes rich anecdotal, empirical and scientometric evidence to delineate the contours of a world system that preserves the dominance of Western knowledge and scholars and the westernisation or peripheralisation of the rest – a system defined by geopolitical and material inequalities, socio-economic class differences, institutional elitism and publishing biases. Demeter’s work counters narratives that present academia as meritocratic and that justify disparities in world publications on the basis of pure rigour, exposing rather norms and values that perpetuate a western elitist system and peripheralise those who happen to lack this cultural capital. Demeter’s work adds to an expanding field of research documenting how Anglophone standards and biases in journal indexing, peer review and editorial board recruitment marginalise consistently the Global South. His practical and concrete suggestions to subvert this system of horizontal and vertical inequalities could not be timelier and provides momentum to decolonisation movements in higher education across the world.” —Dr Romina Istratii, SOAS University of London, UK “Márton Demeter is a scholar dedicated to revealing the inequality in academic publishing and a strong advocate for scholars from the Global South. This book is an epitome of his effort on this cause. Demeter utilizes his wealth of data including authorships, citations, journal publishers, editorial review board compositions, the reviewers and the editors of journals as strong evidence of inequality with his three-dimensional model of academic stratification. This book is a must-read for scholars both in the Global North and the Global South to reflect on the current state of academic knowledge gatekeeping and production. It will spark a dialogue between scholars to address the dominance of the Global North especially in the field of communication.” —Professor Louisa Ha, Bowling Green State University, USA “Márton Demeter’s analysis and critique of the unequal structure of global knowledge production is a powerful contribution to the global justice movement with dramatic implications for what academics in both the Global North and the Global South can do to help science and the humanities live up to their claims of meritocracy and universality. Demeter employs a useful critical combination of the world-systems perspective and Bourdieusian field theory to organize the results of his careful and sophisticated empirical studies of global knowledge production. He is an intrepid protagonist of a more egalitarian human future.” —Professor Christopher Chase-Dunn, University of California, Riverside, USA

This volume compares the western ideas of knowledge with the African. It aims at creating a mirror through which the western knowledge culture can look at itself through an unusual and interesting angle. The culture of Sub-Saharan Africa is the substance from which we, in this book, have tried to construe an epistemological mirror.

"This book illustrates, compares, and discusses models, perspectives, and approaches involved in the distribution, administration, and transmission of knowledge across organizations"--Provided by publisher.