The SURE Facilitation and Synthesis Research project will host a special track at the 18th International Forum on Knowledge Asset Dynamics (IFKAD)
Efforts towards sustainability proliferation have generated a necessity of the employment of advanced and continuously evolving approaches and tools in knowledge management. That is certainly the case in the realm of the built environment disciplines, where there are multiple factors determining the sustainability degree of a project or a solution: geographical, economic, technological, but also – the frequently neglected aspect – cultural.
The SURE Facilitation and Synthesis Research is a meta-research synthesis research project which overlooks ten fundamental-research urban sustainability projects located in seven countries across East and South-East Asia. In such a research setup, the meta-research layer needs to respond to a complex set of challenges, revolving around knowledge management, cross-cultural research setting, transdisciplinarity, reference frameworks, project impact monitoring, and more.
This track wants to explore the above-mentioned challenges from two interconnected angles. From the one angle, papers are invited that discuss the matters of knowledge management of research on research projects (Defila and Di Giulio 2018) in cross-cultural and transdisciplinary setting (Kuhn,2012; Nicolescu, 2002; Wickson at al., 2006). In this aspect, we want to talk about the approaches and difficulties of conducting synthesis research, especially on sustainability, in projects where cultural borders are crossed. In this perspective, the following topics are of the track’s interest:
- challenges of knowledge management in cross-cultural settings / projects / institutional set-ups;
- management approaches / techniques capturing cultural intricacies in knowledge; management of tacit and intrinsic knowledge (Noennig and Hentschel 2011);
- reference frameworks and impact monitoring in cross-cultural projects / settings;
- a critical assessment of knowledge management approaches for sustainable development in the build environment in a globalised setting (Tàbara, 2013).
- The second angle, meanwhile, will focus on tools that can be put to use to support sustainability research in cross-cultural set-ups. This aspect of the discussion will delve into the available technical and methodological ideas of handling such a challenge. In this angle, the following topics can be named:
- transdisciplinary approaches & tools of knowledge management for sustainable build development;
- new perspectives on (digital) tools for knowledge management (Kuhn, 2012);
- data management vs/and knowledge management;
- tools for establishing a (global) reference framework in sustainable development of the build environment;
- tools for synthesis, self-reflection and/or meta-research (Ioannidis, 2015).
Keywords
knowledge science and management, cross-cultural knowledge management, synthesis research, transdisciplinary, sustainable development, tools of knowledge management