The New 'Knowledge Speak': the implications of contested definitions of knowledge and information

This paper presents a critique of notions of information and knowledge found in the management literature and amongst proponents of 'knowledge management' (Davenport and Prusak 2000) interviewed in the course of a study of changing operations of the Federal Government of Canada vis a vis the 'knowledge-based economy' as it is found in Canada (Shields, Taborsky, Jones, and O'Hara 2000). Interviews with a range of Federal Government Departments and Agencies on a number of topics including knowledge management were conducted throughout the Summer of 2000. During these interviews a number of competing definitions and numerous misunderstandings of the relationship between knowledge and information emerged. We will distinguish and contrast these with definitions derived from semiotic and information science frameworks. We argue for the importance of the collective and processual nature of knowledge. Our conclusions allow us to specify the shortcomings of existing knowledge management approaches and to identify a necessary and specific focus for future knowledge initiatives in organizations

Innovation, Design and the Virtual

This article outlines a case for architects and designers to bemore involved in discussions of innovation in constructionand engineering and more generally in discussions of virtualitiesincluding style, community, market, and brand which characterizewealth creation in knowledge societies. The virtual is a strategic topicwhich is a common aspect of both design and innovationand is approachable through design methodologies

Introduction. Going Beyond Melt and Cryodispossession

Non peer reviewe

"Culture Spoken Here" Transdisciplinarity and Cultural Studies in Universities

This paper was first presented in an early version at the Carleton conference, ‘Exploring Contemporary Discourse Analysis’, Ottawa, 1993 and at the ‘Cultural Studies in Canada’ Conference, University of Toronto. My thanks to Penny Ironstone, Jill Scott, A.N. Packwood and conference participants for their comments. A version was previously published in Portuguese in the Brazilian journal Logos 5 1996.p/43-7

Space and Culture as critical practice and as space of culture

What does it mean to describe a journal as an intellectual spaces? What does it mean to create a literary and public space, such as a journal, for reflecting on culture as itself a form of space? This has entailed grasping culture in its topological sense as relational, which brings to bear relations in time as well as space. This paper reflects on 20 years of Space and Culture journal as a project to create an invisible college through the medium of academic journal writing and editing. How has thinking about the spatial evolved over these two decades into network and relational approaches? Questions about particular spaces and places, projects and constructions have raised questions of not only continuity in relations, social and ethical forms but of breaks, bifurcations and crises points. In what ways has an interest in ‘space and culture’ effectively responded to political questions and ideological crises? These are challenging in that they are both localized and globally significant; disproportionately affect specific groups/identities/statuses but raise general questions of justice, equity, respect and care. What can we learn from not only successes but from its gaps and failures and from the sometimes fraught relation of this projects’ ‘affinity for the spatial’ to institutions and forms of critique that have generally been theorized under the rubric of the temporal

Rating the walkability of cities: a participatory approach - Preliminary Research Project

Aiming to increase the importance of pedestrian experience in urban design, we are proposing the development of a participatory walkability rating system, consisting of a mobile application that gathers perceptual and factual data from people’s daily walks. In the first part of this paper we present a review of the existing walkability rating methods and highlight the two key issues of the approaches they use to assess pedestrian friendliness: either they focus on the wrong scale or they implement audit processes that are carried out by a staff or algorithms that are external to the place. In the second part we present the ways our proposal would improve on these approaches, and discuss the results of the pilot that we implemented to test our idea. We found that the development and use of a mobile application would be an asset for the participatory approach of the proposal, though there are several challenges to overcome in future stages of the project

Edmonton Amiskwaciy

he first suburb of Edmonton, the capital of the oil-rich western Canadian prairie province of Alberta, was arguably the Federal Government of Canada's Papaschase Indian reservation 163. Situated inconveniently close to the settlement of Edmonton-Strathcona that had grown up around a Hudson's Bay trading fort, the reservation was eliminated as its starving populace one-by-one 'took scrip' in the mid-to-late 1800s, and accepted payment to cede their Aboriginal rights to reservation land. Almost a century later around 1970, parts of the area of the reservation of the Papaschase Cree became the site of an idealistic project to create an affordable suburb, “Mill Woods”. This paper considers the respatialization of the former Indian Reservation, the "pentimento" or layers of Indigenous, colonial and modern occupancy of the land, and the current precarity and ethnic relations in the suburb of Mill Woods