Equity-Centered Knowledge Brokering: A Narrative Synthesis (Poster 5)

• In Event: Revitalizing Education Through Knowledge Brokerage and Relational Networks

Abstract

Objectives or purposes
Emerging literature has begun to focus on how knowledge brokers, intermediaries, and boundary spanners (considered together as ‘BIBs; Neal et al., 2023) can take an equity-centered approach. Given the many choices BIBs must make within the context of their work and their ethical and material implications, it is important to draw from that literature to identify critical issues, considerations, and guiding principles. This presentation accordingly explores what it means to be an equity-centered BIB.

Theoretical framework
We conceptualize BIBs as actors embedded within larger ecosystems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) who promote evidence use through five main strategies (Neal et al., 2023). BIBs can be understood as strategic actors who – to be effective – must be attuned and responsive to social and political systems at multiple levels. Further, equity-centered brokers must address issues of distribution, recognition, and representation (Fraser, 2008) as they carry out these strategies.

Methods and Data Sources
We reviewed the available literature on BIBs to understand better these actors' roles in promoting equity. We searched for knowledge broker*, intermediar*, and boundary spann* to capture literature describing these individuals and organizations. We also included the terms ethic*, equit*, fair, politic*, and *power, and resource within our searches to capture publications sensitive to the different aspects of equity that BIBs may attend. We integrate various disciplines and schools of thought to understand how BIBs work and can be equity-centered. Given time and resource limitations and the diffuseness of the field, this is not a fully systematic review, and we will likely have omitted some articles on the topic. Nevertheless, we aimed to reach conceptual saturation to produce a narrative account of equity-centered brokering.

Results
This study’s results surface equity-relevant choices and aspects of BIB work. We break this down by strategy (facilitating relationships, finding alignment, advising decisions, capacity building, and dissemination). We identify facilitating relationships as a first-order strategy, with implications and consequences for all other strategies. We also identify valuing diversity and elevating multiple forms of knowledge as being imperative and cutting across all strategies. In terms of tensions, we note the time- and resource-intensiveness of relational, equity-centered brokering, and we point to an ongoing debate regarding whether, when, and how a broker should assume a neutral posture versus being transparent about their values and commitments and its impacts on their thinking and work. We suggest Doucet (2021) provided a helpful guide, noting how it can be useful to distinguish between brokering means and ends.

Scholarly Significance
We hope we have laid out some key contours of what it means and entails to be an equity-centered knowledge broker. We expect that surfacing the key issues and considerations at play will benefit BIBs, those who study them, and those with whom they partner and seek to influence.

Authors

• Joel R. Malin, Miami University (OH)

• Samantha Jo Shewchuk, University of Delaware