Special Issue on reconceptualizing university contribution to knowledge exchange

‘Reconceptualizing university contribution to knowledge exchange - broadening our understanding of knowledge exchange motivations, channels and stakeholders’

Elvira Uyarra guest edited a special issue of Studies in Higher Education with Chiara Marzocchi, Fumi Kitagawa and Federica Rossi on ‘Reconceptualizing university contribution to knowledge exchange: broadening our understanding of knowledge exchange motivations, channels and stakeholders’ in Higher Education Institutions.

This Special Issue represents an effort to go beyond a narrow notion of knowledge exchange (KE) and explicitly address broader questions related to the measurement of and incentives towards KE in Higher education institutions (HEI). Specifically, we bring attention to a number of under-researched topics in the literature. 

These relate to: (i) The participation of a diverse set of academic actors in KE activities – in particular, academics in emerging economies and women academics – whose role in KE is insufficiently investigated in the extant literature; (ii) academics’ engagement with under-explored KE stakeholders, specifically policymakers and the public sector; and (iii) the tensions and tradeoffs that are implicit, but often unacknowledged, in the relationship between HEIs’ traditional teaching and research activities, and KE as a third institutional mission.

The special issue comprises seven papers that seek to broaden our understanding of KE in a broader context, with more diverse audiences and impacts, and deepen the understanding of tensions and trade-offs between university missions – Teaching, Research and Third Mission. The volume altogether sheds light on several themes that have received comparatively less attention in the literature.

You can read this short blog here and access the link to the full collection of papers published.