Different Worlds Together: How Researchers and Practitioners Co-create Knowledge

Abstract

The communities of research and practice are embedded in epistemic cultures that favor specific strategies, practices, and apparatus – in other words, ways of knowing. Scholars have investigated the differences between these communities and how knowledge can be transferred from research to practice; relatively little effort has been spent exploring how these communities can co-create knowledge. We address this omission by observing two projects in which researchers and managers met periodically to co-create knowledge that helps redress sustainability issues. We supplemented these observations with 57 interviews with researchers, managers and project managers who participated in similar projects. Our findings contribute to prior literature on co-creating knowledge across boundaries, and the research-practice gap. Specifically, we find that the moving out of interstitial spaces is as important as being within them; the processes of building boundary objects are as valuable as the knowledge contained within them; and the practices that highlight the provisionality of objects are as important as merely seeing them as incomplete.