Bridging the Divide between Being and Knowing: In Quest of Care-Ethical Agency

Taking up the theme of this year’s Congress – Bridging communities: Making public knowledge, making knowledge public – our panel’s three essays each examines from three different locations how knowledge and knowledge-making function in the contemporary market/knowledge economy: international education, autobiographical inquiry, and teacher education. The educational vision and commitment that these three distinct pieces share is ethics of care. Problematizing commodification of knowledge and its notion of having knowledge, we make the case for the centrality of being in human and societal living. We then make suggestions for how the being-dimension can be conceptualized and lived. In particular, we argue that caring, being present, self-knowing and human agency are central.

Under One Roof

In this essay we share a musical performance ethnography, titled Under One Roof, as an example of one approach to critical arts-based research. The piece stems from commissioned research that took the form of an ethnography of an urban-supported housing scheme for people over 50 years of age. We discuss some tensions of conducting radical democratic performative work within a political climate characterized by the commodification of knowledge and marketization of science. This context provides a backdrop to subsequent reflections around performing praxis through a critical political and cultural engagement. Specifically, we consider how Under One Roof challenges dominant stories about homelessness, poverty, discrimination, alcohol and drug misuse, marginalization, and aging through privileging personal stories. We consider how students’ participation through readings of the script during lectures made it possible, in Henry A. Giroux’s terms, to “connect the practice of classroom teaching with important social problems.”1

Os quatro grandes desafios ao modelo de Ciência Aberta: (des)acreditação, informalidade, comodificação e predação

RESUMO:O modelo de Ciência Aberta, erguido da vontade de democratizar a produção e acesso ao conhecimento científico, surgiu no início do novo milênio como forma de combater o obsoletismo e fechamento da cultura acadêmica tradicional. Mais de uma década depois, cedendo não só às suas fraquezas idiossincráticas, como também à indústria parasitária e do lucro, o modelo de Ciência Aberta passou a enfrentar quatro grandes desafios que são simultaneamente um problema de (des)acreditação do conhecimento produzido, de informalidade das estruturas de avaliação e validação, de comodificação do conhecimento, e de predação do modelo de acesso aberto. Neste texto tentamos perceber aquilo que está na base desses desafios. PALAVRAS-CHAVE: ciência aberta; desafios; (des)acreditação; informalidade; comodificação; predação. ABSTRACT: The Open Science model arose in the beginning of the new millennium from the will to democratize the production and access to scientific knowledge, as a means to fight the obsolete/closed character of traditional academic culture. After more than a decade, conceding not only to its own idiosyncratic weaknesses, but also to a profit-seeking industry, the open science model now simultaneously faces four major challenges: the (dis)accreditation of the scientific knowledge produced, the informality of its validation structures, the commodification of knowledge, and the predation of the open access model. In this essay, we try to understand the basis of these challenges. KEYWORDS: open science, challenges; (dis)accreditation, informality, commodification; predation.

The Commodification of Knowledge and Information

This entry presents an analysis of the commodification of knowledge and information in contemporary capitalism. We provide a consistent account of how information as a commodity effects the workings of both capitalism and of Marxist theory. The first part of the chapter critically revisits Marx’s own writings on the commodification of knowledge and how the immaterial labor hypothesis initially interpreted these writings. Based on the new categories knowledge-commodity and knowledge-rent, we then present our own approach in response to the challenges raised by the immaterial labor hypothesis. Lastly, there is an analysis of the more recent contributions on the commodification of knowledge and information within the Marxist literature. The current debate on the value of knowledge has been divided between two camps: the reproduction cost approach and the average cost approach. Finally, there is a look at empirical estimates of the magnitudes of knowledge-rents.

University Transformations and the New Knowledge Production Regime in Informational Capitalism

This article examines undergoing transformations in universities in the context of the structural crisis of capitalism, which began more than 40 years ago. This crisis is at the heart of one of the main contradictions of capitalism: while capital needs living labour to produce value, the dynamic of accumulation requires the replacement of human labour by machines. We will show how capital attempts to overcome this contradiction by modifying the nature of knowledge, learning institutions and human beings to turn them into productive investments, whose profitability can be measured. The contemporary mutations of universities are linked to the globalization, financialization and commodification of knowledge. We also observe transformations in universities’ institutional arrangements and in individual human consciousness. Our perspective combines institutionalist political economy and Marxian critique of value, showing how material, institutional and cultural transformations are dialectically articulated in a new form of social regulation. We will show how there is a complementarity between the transformations of political, economic and learning institutions and their linkage with a new mode of knowledge production. The general goal being that advanced mastery of knowledge and information will increase the efficiency of the technological and economic system and its endless acceleration.

University Transformations and the New Knowledge Production Regime in Informational Capitalism

This article examines undergoing transformations in universities in the context of the structural crisis of capitalism, which began more than 40 years ago. This crisis is at the heart of one of the main contradictions of capitalism: while capital needs living labour to produce value, the dynamic of accumulation requires the replacement of human labour by machines. We will show how capital attempts to overcome this contradiction by modifying the nature of knowledge, learning institutions and human beings to turn them into productive investments, whose profitability can be measured. The contemporary mutations of universities are linked to the globalization, financialization and commodification of knowledge. We also observe transformations in universities’ institutional arrangements and in individual human consciousness. Our perspective combines institutionalist political economy and Marxian critique of value, showing how material, institutional and cultural transformations are dialectically articulated in a new form of social regulation. We will show how there is a complementarity between the transformations of political, economic and learning institutions and their linkage with a new mode of knowledge production. The general goal being that advanced mastery of knowledge and information will increase the efficiency of the technological and economic system and its endless acceleration.