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The gap between what is known about climate change and the action taken to prevent it has instigated debates around how to reconfigure global environmental assessment organizations to better inform and foster transformative change. One recurring request involves the need for a broader and better inclusion of social scientific knowledge. However, despite such intentions, the inclusion of social scientific research remains limited. How can this be explained? Through a detailed analysis of the IPCC special report on limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees, this article reveals how the institutional conditions of global environmental assessments condition and shape what knowledge is included in these assessments, as well as how this knowledge is represented. It discusses how and why the understanding of social processes and structures remains underdeveloped, despite such knowledge being critical for transformative change. To integrate such knowledge into environmental assessments would require substantial changes to the current epistemic infrastructure used by global environmental assessments. It is therefore time to think beyond global environmental assessments and consider complementary institutional science–policy relations through which social scientific research can assist policy actions to promote deep transformative change.

Organizations conducting global environmental assessments (GEAs) face the challenge of not only producing trustworthy and policy-relevant knowledge but also recruiting and training experts to conduct these GEAs. These experts must acquire the skills and competencies needed to produce knowledge assessments. By adopting an institutional approach, this paper explores IPBES’s epistemic infrastructure that aims to communicate and form the expertise that is needed to conduct its assessments. The empirical material consists of IPBES’s educational material, which teaches new experts how to perform the assessment. The analysis finds three crucial tasks that experts introduced in the assessments are expected to learn and perform. The paper concludes by discussing the broader importance of the findings that organizations that conduct GEAs are not passive intermediaries of knowledge but instead, through their epistemic infrastructure, generate ways to understand and navigate the world, both for those who create and those who receive the assessment report.

This exploratory study aims to understand why, and propose remedies for, the treatment of political risk and sustainability as siloed risk areas in risk analyses. I employ an interdisciplinary theoretical approach that focuses on the roles of values and worldviews, stages of sustainability and hybrid knowledge to understand this siloing. The large-N interpretive method used here combines content frequency counts with discourse analysis to examine over 400 corporate communication documents from 37 companies. The study also explores how, through corporate communication, companies that provide political risk analysis convey what is at risk and what counts as sustainability. I argue that the broad shared ‘cultural’ tones of what it means to be in the political risk field pose challenges for integrating political risk and sustainability. The study concludes with several recommendations on how to overcome the current barriers in order to integrate political risk and sustainability in risk analyses.

Primary school practices are often bound by traditions that perpetuate compliance and skills-based, decontextualized, rote memorization activities. These histories of practice, prevalent in schools serving mostly Black and Brown children, make it inordinately difficult for students to author themselves as knowledge builders (i.e., with epistemic agency), which is a form of injustice. Engineering is a potentially fertile context to support the creation of epistemic culture, whereby young students’ assets are recognized, named, and leveraged as they create and shape the group’s disciplinary knowledge. The authors investigated this potential. The primary research question was: How do first-grade students in an urban emergent school author themselves as epistemic agents during an engineering design unit? Using a social practice theory lens and ethnographic methods, the authors studied 29 days of a materials engineering unit focusing on the teacher’s epistemic commitments, implicit meanings of knowledge in classroom discourse, and practices that opened space for students’ epistemic agency. Data collection included fieldnotes and video of class activities and teacher and student interviews. Class discussions about the properties and uses of materials yielded a rich context for studying epistemic culture. The teacher’s epistemic commitments included an eschewing of disciplinary silos, recognizing the nonlinear nature of knowledge-building about engineering, and acknowledging children’s thinking as an asset for engineering knowledge production. Examples of students’ discursive moves demonstrating epistemic agency included: reminding others about the relevance of previous lessons to the current topic, mirroring the teacher’s instructional moves, claiming voice, space, time, and material resources for knowledge-building, translating one another’s ideas, and making unsolicited connections to their lives. Young children’s intellectual assets can too easily be overlooked in trad

Primary school practices are often bound by traditions that perpetuate compliance and skills-based, decontextualized, rote memorization activities. These histories of practice, prevalent in schools serving mostly Black and Brown children, make it inordinately difficult for students to author themselves as knowledge builders (i.e., with epistemic agency), which is a form of injustice. Engineering is a potentially fertile context to support the creation of epistemic culture, whereby young students’ assets are recognized, named, and leveraged as they create and shape the group’s disciplinary knowledge. The authors investigated this potential. The primary research question was: How do first-grade students in an urban emergent school author themselves as epistemic agents during an engineering design unit? Using a social practice theory lens and ethnographic methods, the authors studied 29 days of a materials engineering unit focusing on the teacher’s epistemic commitments, implicit meanings of knowledge in classroom discourse, and practices that opened space for students’ epistemic agency. Data collection included fieldnotes and video of class activities and teacher and student interviews. Class discussions about the properties and uses of materials yielded a rich context for studying epistemic culture. The teacher’s epistemic commitments included an eschewing of disciplinary silos, recognizing the nonlinear nature of knowledge-building about engineering, and acknowledging children’s thinking as an asset for engineering knowledge production. Examples of students’ discursive moves demonstrating epistemic agency included: reminding others about the relevance of previous lessons to the current topic, mirroring the teacher’s instructional moves, claiming voice, space, time, and material resources for knowledge-building, translating one another’s ideas, and making unsolicited connections to their lives. Young children’s intellectual assets can too easily be overlooked in trad

This paper discusses the knowledge transmission from the English Integrated Children’s System to Swedish BBIC, ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’, in the light of comparative approaches towards child welfare, contemporary advocacy for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches, and the emphasis on knowledge-based social work. The focus is on the conceptual framework of risk assessments in the context of the Swedish child protection system. The purpose is to critically assess children’s epistemic position in these complex processes of knowledge distribution. Discourse analysis is used as a framework for analysis of evaluations, reports and research linked to BBIC and ICS. With the concept epistemic culture, I look more closely at knowledge production and what is included in the realm of ‘evidence’ and research, as well as what is considered to be knowledge-based social work. Such an approach allows for analyses of epistemic cultures that are not necessarily confined to space and instead are widespread and distributed in line with other logics. Preliminary findings indicate how a knowledge transfer serve as a knowledge-legitimizing practice which in many ways exemplifies a homogenization of two geopolitically distinct contexts. From this point of view, BBIC and ICS are tightly interlinked and may be seen as parts of one and the same epistemic culture, similar epistemologies and ontologies of childhood, as well as its epistemic subjects and objects of knowledge. What becomes comparative not only links the two systems’ assumptions of the universal but comparison in itself becomes a legitimizing practice. This paper suggests the importance of going beyond conventional comparative welfare approaches and pay more critical attention to epistemic cultures, a fields’ scientific communities, and disciplinary boundaries when trying to understand contemporary social work.

While in the beginning of the environmental debate, conflicts over environmental and technological issues had primarily been understood in terms of "risk", over the past two decades the relevance of ignorance, or nonknowledge, was emphasized. Referring to this shift of attention to nonknowledge the article presents two main findings: first, that in debates on what is not known and how to appraise it different and partly conflicting epistemic cultures of nonknowledge can be discerned and, second, that drawing attention to nonknowledge in technology conflicts results in significant institutional effects and new constellations of actors in public debates. To illustrate and substantiate this political dynamics of nonknowledge we draw upon examples from the areas of agri-biotechnology and mobile phoning. In a first step, we develop in greater detail the concept of scientific cultures of nonknowledge and identify three such cultures involved in the social conflicts within the two areas. Subsequently, we analyze the specific dynamics of the politicisation of nonknowledge looking at the variety of actors involved and the pluralisation of perceptions and evaluations of what is not known. Then, we point out some of the institutional reactions to the political and cultural dynamics of scientific nonknowledge. We argue that the equal recognition of the diverse cultures of nonknowledge is a key prerequisite for socially legitimate and "robust" decision-making under conditions of politicised scientific nonknowledge. © The Author(s) 2010.

Of great interest to organizational theorists are problems that arise within the sense-making domain. The paper introduces two important theories, both of which were results of empirical work. These are the theory of mundane reason and that of epistemic cultures. These theories together have a powerful impact on organizational theory. Building upon what we know, a Theory of Mundane Reason and Epistemic Culture is proposed. It is suggested that this constructivist approach to research may be justified as a meta-ontology. Mundane reason has been chosen because it has both a factuality and universality. Consequences of this include assumptions that directly impact on the ability to penetrate others? reality. This in turn impacts upon the ability to communicate effectively. Traditional models of communication used in the literature of management and marketing were a product of their time. Theories like the one presented here allow a re-thinking and re-theorising of communication models such as the one chosen as the example in the paper. The paper concludes with a formula for analysing faulty communication resulting from an unawareness of mundane reason and epistemic cultures.