Academic Knowledge Production: Framework of Practical Activity in the Context of Transformative Food Studies

Abstract

We have seen an emergence of transformative food studies as part of sustainability transitions. While some scholars have successfully opened up their experiences of pursuing transformation through scholar-activism, assumptions underlying researchers' choices and how scholars orient to and go about their work often remain implicit. In this article, we bring forth a practice theoretical understanding of knowledge production and advocate that researchers turn to examining their own research practice. We ask how to make our own academic knowledge production/research practice more explicit, and why it is important to do so in the context of transformative food studies. To help scholars to reflect on their own research practice, we mobilize the framework of practical activity (FPA). We draw on our own experiences in academia and use our ethnographic studies on self-reliant food production and procurement to illustrate academic knowledge production. Thus, this article provides conceptual and methodological tools for reflection on academic research practice and knowledge production. We argue that it is important for researchers to turn to and improve their own academic practice because it advances academic knowledge production in the domain of transformative food studies and beyond. While we position ourselves within the qualitative research tradition, we believe that the insights of this article can be applied more broadly in different research fields and across various methodological approaches.

Do both the research community and the general public share an interest in the sleep–pain relationship, and do they influence each other?

“…Ideally, this will transfer into better clinical treatments, as well as self-help treatments for comorbid insomnia and chronic pain, in turn paving way for more effective prevention and treatment in the future. A theoretical model that may help explain this phenomena is the Framework of Practical Activity (Räsänen, 2015), which postulates that researchers need to be aware of their own practice of knowledge production in order to avoid creating a gap between theory and practice whereby the conceptual knowledge produced from research becomes disconnected by practitioners in the same field (Kallio and Houtbeckers, 2020). Because researchers who study the sleep-pain relationship generally are clinically oriented, it may be that they are successful in having their produced research resonate with both clinical practitioners and people who suffer from sleep and pain problems, a hypothesis that is in line with the current study's results.…”

“…However, it may also be that researchers who study the sleep-pain relationship are good at communicating their research, but in the process of producing new knowledge they could be improve their listening to other sources, both regarding previous research and the general public. According to the Framework of Practical Activity, there is a danger in letting theoretical conceptualizations drive knowledge production: Relevant knowledge from clinical practitioners and people who suffer from sleep and pain problems may be ignored and lost and, over time, this preference for academic theory over practical experience may create a rift between academia and practice (Kallio and Houtbeckers, 2020). We therefore encourage researchers who study the sleep-pain relationship to be more apprehensive of-and inspired by-the general public's discourse of the sleep-pain relationship moving forward, lest the promising carryover effect of published research on public interest cease over time.…”

The Importance of Citizen Scientists in the Move Towards Sustainable Diets and a Sustainable Food System

“…Citizen science for tackling food waste (Pateman et al, 2020 this issue), food safety (Reynolds et al, 2021), sourcing global sustainability metrics [for Sustainable Development Goal [SDG]], collection of data and design of evaluation metrics monitoring food and agriculture related SDGs (Ryan et al, 2018;Fritz et al, 2019) are reviewed elsewhere. We also recognise the additional research from this special issue including Kallio and Houtbeckers (2020), Sijtsema et al (2020), andHelenius et al (2020). We highlight that our examples are focused on citizen science at the production, processing and consumption stages of the food system, with food system inputs (natural resources, manufactured inputs or human resources) all offering their own potential citizen science engagement opportunities.…”

The scope of “marketing” research in the nonprofit sector: Lessons from the last 20 years literature

“…On the other hand, nonprofit research has shaped its own disciplinary identity demonstrated through knowledge production research. Knowledge production is a useful method to understand the development of scholarship by empirically studying how researchers make assumptions of and go about it (Kallio & Houtbeckers, 2020). In the nonprofit sector, according to Ma and Konrath (2018), knowledge production research examines research production through publication, such as number of journal articles on nonprofits or scholars' disciplinaries (see: Brass et al, 2018; Brudney & Durden, 1993; Jackson et al, 2014); examination of topics unique to nonprofit research (see: Bushouse & Sowa, 2012; Maier et al, 2016; Shier & Handy, 2014; Wymer & Gross, 2021); or both research production and topic examination (see: Ma & Konrath, 2018).…”