The Fifth Living Knowledge Conference was organized from May 10-12, 2012 at Bonn, Germany.
The theme of the conference was “Re-imagining Research Relationships: Co-creating Knowledge in a Democratic Society”. The conference objectives included:
- Evaluate strategies for embedding community engaged research in universities
- Strengthen participative and empowering communication culture as a basis for healthy knowledge societies
- Influence international research policies and priorities
- Advance the way Science Shop-like initiatives can engage CSOs and researchers in collaborative research activities
- Encourage co-operative and partnership working
- Exchange, disseminate and evaluate results of the first half of the PERARES project
- Bring Science Shops to the policy agenda in Germany
- About 250 participants primarily from universities of Europe attended the Conference. A number of them were members of the International Science Shop network. In addition it included few participants from Canada, USA, Australia, South Africa, Japan, Ghana, Kenya, Armania, China and India, with few CSO representatives.
The conference focused on different themes to get more insight into processes, and develop specific policy recommendations that resonate with public concerns and articulated research needs. The themes included:
- Setting shared research agendas by CSOs and research institutes
- The role of higher education in creating knowledge with communities
- Communities and students learning together
- Evaluation and quality improvement: New lessons learned on measuring the value of community engagement and collaborative research
- Developing partnership working for research - civil society engagement
- Policies to support collaborative research relationships
Panel discussion: “Does policy matter in building partnerships between civil society and research”
The Living Knowledge video on available on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdhcEhv-mps
