Budd Hall & Rajesh Tandon - Guest editors of the GUNi 6th Conference

In this interview Budd Hall, Secretary of the Global Alliance on Community Engaged Research, and Rajesh Tandon, Founder and Chief Functionary of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA), elaborate on the main themes of the upcoming GUNi 6th Conference: transformative knowledge and the importance of community-university engagement for social transformation.
The title of the 6th GUNi Conference pose a call to action based over a truly ambitious challenge: Let's build transformative knowledge to drive social change. What does mean transformative knowledge?    
Budd Hall: Transformative knowledge is knowledge that can be used to expand democracy and contribute to social change. It is knowledge that may be created by women and men at the heart of a social movement working together without any reference to academic knowledge. It could be knowledge created when community groups and academics work together in co-constructing an understanding of reality. Transformative knowledge may be an integral part of organizing for the protection of human rights, the deepening of social justice or the advancement of freedom. Examples of transformative knowledge include the ancient knowledge of Indigenous Peoples used to protect environmental rights for everyone and the legal rights of women and girls for a life free of violence.
Rajesh Tandon: The historical purpose of all knowledge has been to improve human conditions. Knowledge production was historically carried out with societal improvement purposes as humanity evolved its life situations. Today, a call for transfromative knowledge is a call to re-claim that historical human tradition. Over the past century, knowledge production gradually disconnected from the societal priorities for improvements in human conditions; knowledge began to be treated as a commodity for private benefits of knolwedge producers and their sponsors. In the past decade or so, the push towards knowledge economy has further reduced the transformative purpose of knowledge. Humanity faces civilisational crises today; its capacity to transform itself into a sustainable society for the next generations depends a great deal on creating and mobilising transfromative knowledge that can begin to provide new and innovative solutions to our crises. Read more...