Gillian Cornish
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow working on CSIRO's Valuing Sustainability Future Science Platform, a transdisciplinary team of researchers investigating the future of sustainability. I am contributing to the Knowledge Commons project that examines the challenge of moving from gathering data about sustainability to co-producing coherent and cohesive knowledge with sustainability decision-makers. The impact of this project builds knowledge infrastructure to maximise the chances that our investments in data and information result in useful (and used) sustainability knowledge.
I am a human geographer interested in how different groups of society interact with broader institutional and social systems. Often adopting a community development perspective, my past research has focussed on understanding how impacted groups have been affected by a change in, or introduction of, policies, programs or projects. I have work experience in urban development, digital agtech and natural resource management sectors with a particular focus on the resilience of marginalised groups.
Sessions
The assumptions we have about the way the world works, or believe it should work, dictate how we engage with the challenges of environmental sustainability. As researchers, these assumptions underpin our approach to understanding the human experiences of and institutional responses to climate change and other environmental crises. This presentation begins to highlight the role of knowledge systems in the sustainability challenges we face and questions what potential consequences occur when different ‘ways of knowing’ conflict. Knowledge is the ‘know how’, or the application of data and information to answer ‘how’ questions and is the product of knowledge systems. Knowledge systems are the practices and routines that facilitate communication, translation and mediation of knowledge across boundaries. Currently, how we innovate and communicate knowledge across disciplinary, epistemological and institutional boundaries tends to be unclear, preventing ideas being shared across our diverse knowledge systems. To address complex and international sustainability challenges, we need to be able to improve communication, translation, and absorption of knowledge. By planning to investigate different information governance arrangements across different knowledge systems, we aim to be able to usher in conditions for more collaborative and equitable approaches to knowledge and cost/benefit sharing. This presentation will make the case for why we need to improve our understanding of knowledge systems and explore how that might happen with diverse epistemologies in mind.
Recording link: https://acspri-org-au.zoom.us/rec/share/DYxTB5FFWvQLpJmIZyFeE91Pm_RiSDITsJSHi_tIJB-fdVgMERUhGFmKMbauWdWD.o9YagllL9mOA7gX9?startTime=1669257754000