Knowledge Alchemy: Models and Agency in Global Knowledge Governance

Abstract

This panel is about knowledge alchemy – a generic process of transforming mundane practices and policies of knowledge governance into competitive ones following imagined global gold standards and universal symbolic formulas. Knowledge alchemy is prevalent around the world, informing national and institutional policies and practices on global competitiveness, higher education, and innovation. Given how interdependent the world remains, knowledge alchemy is also embedded in transnational administration and steers global policymaking. To understand contemporary national and transnational governance, it is thus essential to know how knowledge alchemy unfolds across multiple policy domains and sectors. Over the past few decades, there has been a surge of global rankings and indicators, resulting in quantification and numerical comparisons of various domains. Global ranking producers now highlight education and innovation as remedies for future challenges of digitization and automation by algorithms. Knowledge governance – the processes of steering and governing state information – has been identified as essential in ensuring national economic competitiveness. Global knowledge governance is strongly future oriented and anticipatory, but somewhat paradoxically builds on historical analogies where the assumed medieval patterns of academic mobility, professionalization, city-states, cartography and navigation are now projected onto expected futures.

Title	Details
New Imperialisms in the Making? The Geo-Political Economy of Transnational Mobility in the UK and China	View Paper Details
Knowledge Alchemy and the Talent Imaginary: Emergence and Evolution	View Paper Details
Global Knowledge Governance: Indicators, Scripts, and Imaginaries	View Paper Details
Strategies of Knowledge Alchemy in Global Higher Education	View Paper Details
Role of national and transnational interest organizations in global knowledge governance	View Paper Details