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Practising globalising research: enacting new worlds?. Nick Lewis Richard Le Heron School of Environment The University of Auckland. Social science, globalising research, and global challenges.
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Practising globalising research: enacting new worlds? Nick Lewis Richard Le Heron School of Environment The University of Auckland
Social science, globalising research, and global challenges • Social science apprehends, represents and enacts knowledge about the relations that make the world ... and their consequences. • Interfering in the realities of worlds to make a difference and to help shape new realities, requires new tools / practices for understanding and engagement with consequences, complexity and elusiveness • Post-structuralist political economy seeks to know and re-narrate the mediation of investment decisions by engaging widely and opportunistically in institution building • Universities are being remade internally and at their borders as what counts as valid and useful knowledge, a legitimate and/or effective knowledge producer, and how to produce and deploy knowledge is being rethought • Globalising research networks are not just part of this set of changes, they are constitutive of them – can they be invented and practiced, and is there the will to know and make better worlds?
Practising globalising higher education and research from the bottom
Message lines • New linkages are being assembled into something greater than the links • Embrace heterogeneity and its generative capacity • Nation state projects are open in new ways to agenda setting initiatives • Disciplines can be revitalised by innovative disruption of their borders • Universities are placed: in status relations, intellectual agendas, nation state projects, the relations of their academics, and funding regimes • Academics imagine/initiate/drive/facilitate projects: they do creative work and are entrepreneurial engines of their universities – the challenge is to enliven not discipline this creativity • Global spaces can enhance this creativity • What global, where/whose global? • Academics need to embrace a politics and practice of possibility • Universities need to draw on expertise of ROs rather subject academics to them – questions here for ‘doing’ GE&R (‘the’ WUN model) • The GRHE global challenge is a field of opportunity for assembling relations, ideas, insights, discoveries and stuff • No design for an effective network, but examples of what can be done