{"id":12554,"date":"2009-10-07T11:35:55","date_gmt":"2009-10-07T15:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/researchimpact.ydsinc.ca\/knowledge-brokers-and-the-metaphors-they-love\/"},"modified":"2021-11-23T15:03:24","modified_gmt":"2021-11-23T20:03:24","slug":"knowledge-brokers-and-the-metaphors-they-love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/researchimpact.ca\/fr\/archive\/knowledge-brokers-and-the-metaphors-they-love\/","title":{"rendered":"Knowledge Brokers and the Metaphors They Love"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. <\/em><em>A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.<\/em><br \/>\nAs a graduate student at York University, the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit has provided not just summer work but an opportunity to learn about some of the more policy-relevant research being carried out on campus. But as a PhD candidate in York\u2019s Department of English, my relationship to KM is a bit murkier. Scholars, critics, professors, and graduate students who study literature are not typically engaged in research that is obviously policy relevant or that has much of a direct, material impact on, say, a local community. The same is probably true of academics in other areas, such as the fine arts. KM encompasses a pretty broad suite of services, but what can it offer disciplines like English \u2013 disciplines where research, though valuable in and of itself, does not necessarily always aim to have an explicit social use?<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-953\" style=\"border:0 none;margin:5px;\" title=\"Silos\" src=\"http:\/\/researchimpact.files.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/old-silo.jpg\" alt=\"Silos\" width=\"202\" height=\"300\" \/>Well, one thing KM offers \u2013 or, at least, one thing it has offered <em>me<\/em> \u2013 is a better understanding of the nature of collaboration. There\u2019s a lot of chatter, in the world of research, about the need to break through the silos in which academics are often isolated, and to bring these supposed hermits blinking into the light, into contact with others. Of course, the image of the researcher in the silo has become a clich\u00e9, and clich\u00e9s can grate a bit, especially when you study poetry, as I\u2019m fortunate enough to do. (Poetry, see, often tries to avoid clich\u00e9s in pursuit of some more memorable way to say what amounts to the same old thing.) But when I really think about the clich\u00e9 of the silo, I can\u2019t help but picture an academic in an <em>actual<\/em> grain silo, up to his Adam\u2019s apple in sorghum or something. As I picture it, this poor professor (or graduate student, or researcher) is talking and talking, saying important things even though the words remain trapped in the silo, caroming around, echoing uselessly. Outside of the silo, passing pedestrians hear only muffled noises, if they hear anything at all \u2013 if they even notice the silo! The silo, I should add, isn\u2019t necessarily the academic\u2019s fault; it may be the result of a discipline\u2019s insularity, or the rigidity of institutional barriers, or any number of roadblocks for which there may be good reasons.<br \/>\nKnowledge brokers would seem to be those folks intent on knocking some holes into the silo \u2013 not <em>just<\/em> to let some beams of light in but also to let some beams of light <em>out<\/em>: out of the silo and into the community. They don\u2019t want to dismantle the silo <em>per se<\/em>; they just want to help spread the sorghum. Or something.<br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-954\" style=\"border:3px solid black;margin:5px;\" title=\"Silos\" src=\"http:\/\/researchimpact.files.wordpress.com\/2009\/09\/silo1.jpg\" alt=\"Silos\" width=\"228\" height=\"171\" \/>So the silo metaphor, though a little clich\u00e9 and unwieldy, is not so bad, if you really think about it (and, by doing so, rehabilitate it). And KM people, like poetry people, are always, it seems, thinking in metaphors and analogies and similes. One of the better metaphors sees knowledge brokers as agnostics: in other words, they believe in collaboration but have no firm, orthodox ideas about the form that collaboration should take. Another good one: knowledge brokers are especially imaginative matchmakers. They\u2019re always looking to manufacture novel matches between researchers, policy-makers, and practitioners. They\u2019re open to different, Twister<sup>\u00ae<\/sup>-like relationships.<br \/>\nWhatever else KM represents \u2013 and this may include many things \u2013 it surely represents the potential of two-way relationships, the potential to learn from others even as they learn from you, the opportunity not just to mobilize knowledge (like the clich\u00e9 of the rolling, moss-less stone) but to <em>share<\/em> knowledge. To engage in activities that are mutually beneficial. To make, I suppose, metaphors. A metaphor, after all, enables us to see one thing in terms of another. It enables a connection.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems. As a graduate student at York University, [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/researchimpact.ca\/fr\/archive\/knowledge-brokers-and-the-metaphors-they-love\/\">Lire la suite\u2026<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> from Knowledge Brokers and the Metaphors They Love<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2386],"tags":[1551,1571,2063,1677],"class_list":["post-12554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archive","tag-brokers-fr-2","tag-kmb-fr-2","tag-silos-fr-2","tag-students-fr-2"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v28.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Knowledge Brokers and the Metaphors They Love - Research Impact Canada<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/researchimpact.ca\/fr\/archive\/knowledge-brokers-and-the-metaphors-they-love\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"fr_FR\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Knowledge Brokers and the Metaphors They Love - Research Impact Canada\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems. 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