The core business of higher education institutions such as universities is knowledge production. This is achieved by conducting research which results in various research products being produced, as well as through teaching and the production of graduates. The main objective of the study was to explore and describe knowledge production practices and their attributes within a university environment at the University of Zambia. The study's major contribution to knowledge is that it indicates to what extent this objective is achieved. A mixed methods case study approach that used both quantitative and qualitative research methodology was adopted for the study. The mixed methods analysis framework was based on grounded theory, bibliometric techniques, and concurrent triangulation. The site of investigation was the School of Medicine at the University of Zambia. The sampling technique also adopted a mixed methods approach by using purposive, availability and stratified purposeful sampling to sample the respondents. The PubMed/Medline database, academic staff, key informants and the documents reviewed all served as the key sources of information for the study. Data obtained from PubMed/Medline, questionnaires and semi structured interviews were quantitatively analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software, while the more qualitative information that was gleaned from open-ended questions, semi-structured interviews and documentary sources was analysed thematically. The subject analysis of PubMed/Medline articles was done using the VOSviewer software and Microsoft Excel. The findings reveal that the yearly research output from 1995 to 2015 was 281 scholarly papers in 159 journals. The lowest number of papers published were recorded in 1997, 2000, and 2004 while the years 2013, 2014 and 2015 show the highest number of papers per year; and the highest was recorded in 2015. It was found that, except in 1997 and 2000, most of these papers were authored by more than five researchers. This indicates a high degree of collaboration. The journals in which the academic staff were publishing in emanated from all over the world; Asia, Africa, Europe and North America. The journals themselves are also a combination of both high impact factor journals such as the PLoS One, American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, International Journal of Tuberculosis and Lung Disease, The Lancet, Malaria Journal and those with no impact factor like the Medical Journal of Zambia. The results indicate that the respondents mostly investigated and published in subject fields related to diseases most prevalent in Zambia, i.e. HIV and Aids, Malaria and Tuberculosis. In addition, the findings indicate that the majority of the academic staff were born after 1960 (73%), with high digital information retrieval skills (95.2%), and with their research output published mainly in journals. The knowledge was produced for various reasons: 85.4% for research purposes, 80.5% for academic promotion, 80.5% for production of knowledge, 73.2% to improve teaching, 61% to provide evidence, 51.2% to change practice, 41.5% to improve policy, 41.5% for personal advancement, and 24.4% for research funding. The knowledge was produced ethically, advancing scholarship, and deemed to be beneficial to society. The overall conclusion drawn from the study is that the knowledge productivity of the School of Medicine has steadily increased over the years and that this is supported by various institutional policies. Additionally, there is increased collaboration with persons outside the continent, whilst there is less collaboration with countries in Africa. The key recommendation for the School of Medicine is that it should work with and within the various layers of the university's institutions such as the Library, Directorate of Research and Graduate Studies, University of Zambia Press, and the Centre for Information and Communication Technology. This would ensure that impediments to knowledge production, diffusion and utilisation are mitigated.

This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The blog and the comments reveal important discussions of knowledge production strategies of racialization and racism in popular media. Specifically, these negotiations expose three major registers of whiteness that are continually enacted within the discourses of the blog and the comments. These registers encompass understandings of whiteness as biological superiority and heritage; defining whiteness as a performance of privilege; and whiteness as an enactment of dominance and oppression. Sites of antiracist educational pedagogy are also discussed within this study to reveal the importance of investigating everyday discourses and understandings of race for the future.

This thesis is a study of knowledge practices in contemporary eastern Tibetan villages, where indigenous knowledge, the modern state's rationality and modern science intermingled. The place is rich in the interplay of forms of knowledge. Based on ethnographic observation and reading in hydropower archives, I focus on local knowledge controversies, where there were clashes between the claims of villagers on the one hand, and local officials and visiting scientists on the other. Through the collection of controversies, I observed how different knowledge claims came into contact or conflict with each other, how these conflicts were resolved either in acquiescence or in coordination, and how a conclusion about knowledge was reached in each particular case. In challenging some common assumptions about knowledge production, the thesis makes a contribution to knowledge studies. When researching this subject, scholars have generally studied either the suppression of folk / native knowledge by modern science, or the pure local forms of knowledge as a means of resistance against scientificization. The thesis argues that in contrast to this standard presumption, an alternative form of knowledge production exists. Suppression or resistance are not the only options, hybridization can also be a procedure to produce knowledge, where the outcome is not necessarily purely scientific or purely folk. The case studies I examine do not show either a ruthless plunge into the universe of modern science or an eradication of the modern side and a return to entirely local knowledge. Although modern meteorology prevailed in the face of Tibetans' claims for compensation for destruction of crops by a storm, villagers on the wind-impacted farmlands deconstructed and re-legitimized the science of weather, they did not merely face a simple choice between science and the folk. In another case, villagers clashed with one another on how to delimit the mountain boundary in legal documents, and the state officials took a passive role in these controversies: the geographical entity was not born through suppression, but through villagers' free intellectual movement on the knowledge landscape, from state forestry archives, to local foraging histories, to personal biographies. A controversy over activities related to hydropower manifests the absence of suppression most clearly. Villagers clashed with scientists over seismic damage to local houses, with each side seeking to prove that the damage was or was not caused by a hydropower explosion experiment. The resulting memorandum of understanding that resolved the controversy does not certify scientific explanation nor the folk claim, but is rather a hybridization of incompatible elements from both sides. In this way, the outcome of knowledge-formation through controversies in these Tibetan villages did not fit straightforwardly with the 'logics' of either side. Nevertheless, they were made intelligible and valid as a knowledge in place, in time, and as produced by local groups of people. Simple suppression does not explain local knowledge formation, knowledge derives from complex interplays between scientific, indigenous and administrative practices and narratives.

This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The blog and the comments reveal important discussions of knowledge production strategies of racialization and racism in popular media. Specifically, these negotiations expose three major registers of whiteness that are continually enacted within the discourses of the blog and the comments. These registers encompass understandings of whiteness as biological superiority and heritage; defining whiteness as a performance of privilege; and whiteness as an enactment of dominance and oppression. Sites of antiracist educational pedagogy are also discussed within this study to reveal the importance of investigating everyday discourses and understandings of race for the future.

As our society merges with the digital, new issues of community, collaboration and knowledge production have risen to the forefront of the social sciences in a quest to explore what this means at both the macro and micro level. Collaborative knowledge production is the process of a large group of individuals joining forces to co-create tangible pieces of information. It only functions when a critical mass of individuals get together to co-create the resource. As these actions are unpaid, voluntary work, the challenge is to motivate individuals to donate their own resources (such as time and expertise) to the project.   This paper examines the motivations behind such actions, and whether or not a community is inevitably constructed by such actions, indeed whether or not community is even theoretically possible in the online sphere.  wikiHow.com, a popular collaborative website, was used as an in-depth case-study in my research. I chose a qualitative approach, distributing both open and closed questionnaires to participants on the wikiHow website through both snowball and convenience sampling methods. The theoretical discussion and analysis draws apon work from Wellman, Putnam, Levy, Lessig, Benkler and Maslow, among others prominent in the field.  Participants revealed they were driven to contibute by numerous, interlinked motivations, linked primarily by the high level of importance they placed on social activities. This study provides novel evidence that wikiHow users are multifaceted entities, driven by a large range of factors with a strong emphasis on seeking out and participating in social interaction. This leads us to label wikiHow as a definitively modern community and allows us to conclude that community has not disappeared, rather it has evolved and adapted to include emergent digital possibilities.

This masters’ thesis is a case study using an antiracist methodology and critical discourse analysis to analyze a popular blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’ and asks the main research question: How is whiteness represented and understood in the satirical blog, ‘Stuff White People Like’? Grounded in theories of representation, discourse, myth and racialization, the thesis looks at two posts, “#1 Coffee” and “#92 Book Deals” and their user comments to investigate the ways whiteness is defined, understood, produced and negotiated. The blog and the comments reveal important discussions of knowledge production strategies of racialization and racism in popular media. Specifically, these negotiations expose three major registers of whiteness that are continually enacted within the discourses of the blog and the comments. These registers encompass understandings of whiteness as biological superiority and heritage; defining whiteness as a performance of privilege; and whiteness as an enactment of dominance and oppression. Sites of antiracist educational pedagogy are also discussed within this study to reveal the importance of investigating everyday discourses and understandings of race for the future.

The production of knowledge has become a matter of power rather than truth and can serve either serve as a tool of liberation or domination. This creative project seeks to explore the interaction of power, knowledge and media in Africa given its history with European colonialism. This period painted Africa as an uneducated and dark continent that had no history and no knowledge. This belief has led to assumptions about knowledge production which are embedded in racist conventions rather than the free and fair pursuit of complete knowledge. The processes of knowledge production are ranked in a hierarchy and in this system of classification, focus on the written word has dominated curriculums while other systems of knowledge production, specifically the oral tradition, have largely been undervalued and ignored. As such, what is a vibrant, complex and active tradition of African orality in the pursuit and preservation of knowledge has been relegated to the back rooms of academia and scholars are not allowed to access to a variety of methods that can be used to know and understand the world. In analysing the current climate of knowledge production and the role media plays in Africa one must examine several questions: How did the West become the centre of knowledge production? What value can be extracted from the African oral tradition in the pursuit of knowledge in the current system of knowledge production? What are the implications of this on Africans as producers of knowledge and Africa's media landscape? While this creative project does not answer these questions entirely, it opens conversations about how we understand and experience knowledge, media, and power in an African context. Guided by the frameworks of power and postcolonial theory and decolonisation, this creative project aims to offer a critical but open-ended analysis of the state of African knowledge production and media while centring the African oral tradition. This project also aims to begin the work of creating a collection of oral stories to highlight the wisdom and insight that comes from the African oral tradition and what it can offer. Ultimately, this project is a call to widen our epistemological landscapes by including African ways of knowing and media use.

The politics of knowledge in the age of the internet is concerned with many overlapping elements. From the reimagining of research in relation to the new infrastructures to the development of new technologies and their social, cultural, ontological, and epistemological implications, here the politics of knowledge centers around questions of information technology infrastructures in late capitalism, the control society, and reflexive modernization. As these social and political theories operate across academic disciplines and organizational systems, new formulations of knowledge production arise such as transdisciplinary research. Transdisciplinary research can be considered as a model for knowledge production that is still capable of recognizing the shared and processual nature of knowledge that operates contrarily to the objectified and commodified understanding of knowledge in late capitalism. Using critical analysis centered in considerations of reflexivity and the control society, I argue for the possibility of alternative cyberinfrastructures for the e-sciences and virtual learning environments as systems of cultural reproduction. These alternatives privilege constructions of science understood as creative, social, and processual following the findings of actor-network theory and the theories of Deleuze and Guattari. Finally, I argue that we are co-constructing a politics of knowledge within and through the infrastructures that we are building, and within these politics there is a conception of the practices of science and research that could be informed by a reconsideration of social theories of technology and our contemporary social and political theory in relation to the development of future technologies and future ways of understanding those technologies. / Ph. D.

Given current environmental crises, many citizens have taken personal concern towards the issues and seek to become involved in the solutions. The integration of democracy and knowledge production plays an important role in this situation, in order to include the values and interests of citizens in the traditionally scientifically driven world of natural resource management. Public participation in natural resource management has manifested in a variety of ways given societal and environmental circumstances, as well as political legislation of nations. Emergent models bear many similarities and difference, which creates the opportunity to understand how models can learn from one another. This research studies two cases of public participation in natural resource management, with two different models of participation: Ontario, Canada with a primarily top-down participation model, and the communities around Lake Tämnaren, Sweden, with their bottom-up model. This research seeks to understand if the models of participation affect the outcomes of the projects and how democracy plays a role in the different models. To compare these two cases, interviews were conducted (12 participants in Canada and 6 participants in Sweden), along with field observations and document analysis. Results of the research indicate the models of participation have different challenges and advantages to once another, but the main obstacle in both scenarios relates to the support in terms of finances and resources available to the projects. The research concludes there is a need for bottom-up approaches to public participation in order to sustain deliberative democracy in the projects, but with top-down support there is much more immediate action taken towards solving issues at hand.

This study examines the role of the university in the domain of nanotechnology research and training using the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) as a case study. It focused on the Faculties of Science and Engineering, given their involvement in the field. It is essentially a qualitative study based on documentary analysis and semi-structured interviews with academic staff members. It shows how the University of Witwatersrand has responded to the South African National Nanotechnology Strategy set by the South African government to enhance the country’s global competitiveness and sustainable economic growth in strategic areas. The study reveals that Wits has selectively by firmly engaged in the domain of nanotechnology and has laid the foundations for a comprehensive programme in both research and training. However, its success in this direction will largely depend upon the ways it maximises the use of the increasing opportunities offered by globalization and it manages the constraints associated with it. By opportunities here I refer to the multiplicity of research sites outside the narrow academic domain and the increasing interest displayed by government, the private sector and relevant international agencies in the field. The constraints are connected to the fact that the field of nanotechnology remains incipient and suffers from the uncertainties surrounding a relatively young field of enquiry in universities in South Africa (financial shortages, lack of skills etc).