Evolving academic culture to meet societal needs

Abstract

Given today’s complex societal challenges, academia should work better with government, industry and others in offering innovative solutions that benefit our society, economy and environment. Researchers across disciplines must work together and with decision-makers to understand how science can have better on-the-ground impacts toward longer-term, resilient societal outcomes. This includes, for example, by working with end-users in problem formation and throughout research projects to ensure decision-making needs are being met, and by linking physical science to additional fields like economics, risk communication or psychology. However, persistent barriers to collaborating across disciplines and with external decision-makers remain. Despite decades of studies highlighting the need for interdisciplinary research and science for decision-making, academic institutions are still not structured to facilitate or reward such collaboration. A group of researchers and educators used a mixed-methods approach to consider the knowledge base on interdisciplinary research and evidence-based policymaking, as well as their own experiences, and formed targeted and actionable recommendations that can help academia overcome these barriers. Their recommendations, specifically targeted to administrators, institutional leads, individual researchers, and research funders, align to three categories: define the role of academia in linking to policy; incorporate nontraditional standards in evaluating success; and build trust while drawing the line between knowledge dissemination and activism. By implementing the following recommendations, academics can foster the culture change that is needed to promote interdisciplinarity, strengthen the impact of their work and help society address urgent and multi-faceted problems.

RETRACTED ARTICLE: Creating an optimal environment for distance learning in higher education: discovering leadership issues

“…The goal is to find out whether leadership can be developed during distance education. Thus, hypotheses of Jacob (2015), Wowk et al (2017), and Kromydas (2017) about leadership in education have been confirmed. For this, models and characteristics associated with leadership and leaders have been identified, then they have been correlated with the distance learning environment to determine the presence or absence of contradictions.…”

“These are the realities”: insights from facilitating researcher-policymaker engagement in Nigeria’s household energy sector

“…We then draw on findings from the research to underscore the potential for strengthening evidence-policy exchanges at specific junctures in national energy policymaking processes and conclude by reflecting on the implications for similarly challenging policy contexts. Our findings are an important addition to the growing literature on practical pathways to influence public policy (Witting, 2017), especially for researchers ill-prepared for the task by traditional academic training (Wowk et al, 2017).…”

Mediating Knowledge Co-Production for Inclusive Governance and Delivery of Food, Water and Energy Services in African Cities

“…In administering this framework, the primary role of researchers should be to broker knowledge rather than be the sole generators of it, giving due consideration to the inputs of different actors in the process (Cairney & Oliver, 2018). As Boswell and Smith (2017) and Wowk et al (2017) point out, doing so would entail a shift by individual researchers and academic institutions away from traditional understandings of what constitutes excellent research and seeing societal and policy impact as an integral component of this measure.…”