Power and the Construction of Knowledge: Overcoming Dynamics of Dominance in the Information Age

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Brief Description

The “information age” has brought new ways to deliver knowledge but has reinforced conflicts between accepted knowledge and unaccepted knowledge that shape our understanding of the world. Even without deliberate suppression, patterns of economic and cultural dominance ensure that information flows reinforce dominant perspectives. Now we also see rifts between authentic intelligence and artificial intelligence; misinformation and disinformation; public relations substituting for knowledge; silencing and marginalization of scholars in the academy and journalists at large; assaults on truth and the rights of individuals; economic assaults on authors and creators; and destruction of academic institutions. The roundtable will address threats to the understanding of intellectual property rights as human rights, politically-driven reshaping of academic institutions in Hungary, unseen currents of tacit knowledge and the transgenerational transmission of knowledge in South Slavic oral traditions that speak to the nature and validation of knowledge in the information age, and a new knowledge initiative on gender-related data on the countries of Central Asia and Mongolia that aims to recenter local and repressed perspectives. Is there a path to liberation of our knowledge systems? The roundtable format is intended to promote a lively discussion.

Sub Unit

• Library/Information Sciences

Chair

• Janice T. Pilch, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

Roundtable Members

• Danica Anderson, The Kolo: Women's Cross-Cultural Collaboration

• Barbara Brigida Krupa, Stanford U

• Christina K Peter, Columbia U

• Janice T. Pilch, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• Ryan Womack, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey