Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach

"Viewing knowledge as travelling between sites, rather than flowing like currents through them or diffusing out from them, the contributors to this collection stress the human intention which shapes and drives how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed to serve differing and uneven interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability. They home in on a vast range of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities--like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, and high performance computers--to the more conceptual apparatuses of telecommunications, statistics, and food sovereignty. Moreover, this volume decentersthe Global North in its focus, tracking how knowledge travels in all directions across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, and Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the US and the UK. The variety of kinds of knowledge that are addressed in the chapters brings forth an extraordinary array of state and non-state actors and institutions committed to performing the work needed to move knowledge across national borders"--
A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and  statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.