Knowledge Broker Stories: Knowledge Mobilization is at the core

Knowledge Mobilization is a big part of my work.  I don’t think of it however, as a separate piece.  Since 2001, I have served as the Executive Director of an applied research centre – the Centre for Families, Work & Well-being at the University of Guelph (www.worklifecanada.ca).  We do most of our work in collaboration with organizations with identified research needs.  Knowledge brokering, exchange and translation are simply essential to my job.

Our focus has a deep resonance with people’s lived experience.  We have the opportunity to talk about practical problems that occur in all of our lives but that show up in a myriad of ways for each of us.  The popular press uses “work-family balance” as a handle for some of this, but I would ask that we shift to thinking about caring and working in webs and networks.  This often leads to contradictions in relationships  - as they occur in different contexts rather than as a simple set of scales to be tipped.

My starting point in working with community organizations or individuals is not to produce documents that follow social marketing guidelines.  We don’t start from the concept of getting messages across in the right way to the right audience and developing that sort of logical framework to rationalize all the work –although, there are lots of good folks doing that kind of work, many resources available and it is great to have people doing those things as part of our broader team.  My work is to bring together “those audiences” as players in the research process at the beginning rather than only as end users.  This is a deliberate attempt to confuse the distinction between evidence based practice and practice based evidence. We just don’t deliver but also respond when some of those “audiences” approach the university.

For me, the “broker” role is both being an architect and a facilitator.  Following a route of devising and supporting large complex research partnerships like the Father Involvement Research Alliance or the Rural Women Making Change Alliance  I tend to think of the structure of the problem and then weave in the content.  I try to support careful thinking about who from the academy or community should be invited and what role we will all play at a table responding to community research needs. 

These considerations change not only the research questions, the way those questions will be “operationalised”, and the “sensibility” or ideological foundation demonstrated through the assumptions of the research (no objectivity claims from me), but also the way that new knowledge will be generated and will flow across systems.

Having policy makers, community people and university researchers eat at the same table means that whether you like it or not, word will get out.  Part of the discovery process is how to harness the flow that is already there.  This is a thinking process that is much different than deciding which evidence based practice will be delivered to those waiting for it.  We focus instead on sharing ideas, coming to agreements and principles of working together, and have excellent conversations to both support the work as well as produce good outcomes.

Facilitation is critical – at the beginning, the middle and the end – managing the tensions that arise and structuring or restructuring so that people can do the good work they want to do.  Conceptualizing, carrying out and moving research results to practice is an art when done in collaboration.  The closer you are to how the research itself is (or was) conceptualized (the more you expand your brain to understand the research or practice area if not your own) the better the mobilization efforts will be.  From this you will be able to recognize that those unexpected challenging moments are really opportunities to push the work forward.  To summarize, my best work includes constant learning, good conversations, and occasionally failing but always with really good food.

Linda Hawkins

To cite:

MLA format
Hawkins, Linda, "Knowledge broker stories: Knowledge Mobilization is at the core." Weblog Entry. Knowledge Mobilization Works Blog. Posted November 9, 2009. Accessed (enter date). http://bit.ly/3ZxixJ

APA format
Hawkins, L. Knowledge broker stories: Knowledge Mobilization is at the core. Retrieved (enter date) from http://www.knowledgemobilization.net [http://bit.ly/3ZxixJ]

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