Meeting of minds and futures: The nature of knowledge in diverse global settings

Abstract

When we think of communities of the future, we have to think of new social contracts between universities and society with a different ecology, and an intense compatibility towards transdisciplinarity. We know that today there is a need for truly fundamental reflections and questions on knowledge as the building block of global societies worldwide. But we suffer from a lack of clear understanding of what is the ‘definition’ of the knowledge that we are talking about. Universities are awash with literature on knowledge societies, knowledge economies, and scientific knowledge, but there is no notion of the social contract that should underpin the different understandings of knowledge as they reveal themselves in diverse settings. This article summarises many conversations between the two co-authors with Jarl Bengtsson as they battled to find answers to these pertinent questions and some of the deep issues facing the whole of humanity.