Knowledge, Power and Dissent - new UNESCO publication

23 January 2007

"Knowledge, Power and Dissent" a new UNESCO publication subtitled "Critical Perspectives on Higher Education and Research in Knowledge Society", explores the relationship between the knowledge society and higher education. As part of the Education on the Move series, it seeks an understanding of how to ensure sustainable human development.

The unfolding of the ‘knowledge society’ is crucially important for governments, the world of learning and research, and society at large in the 21st century. This volume explores the ramifications of the knowledge society in its special relationship to higher education. At stake is a deeper understanding of how to ensure sustainable human development in the future.

Although the knowledge society is a central construct, each discipline interprets it according to its own conceptual framework, intellectual territory, operational criteria and specific vocabulary. As the contributions to this book make clear, genuine dialogue across varied fields and intellectual paradigms must draw on scholarly heterodoxy and real diversity.

In determining the research agenda in higher education, the dimensions and dynamic at the heart of the knowledge nexus should be explored in a way that does justice to global trends while accounting for their local implications.

Balancing the reflective and the provocative, Knowledge, Power and Dissent tackles these challenges through careful scholarship and grounded case studies setting the local impact of global trends in context. In setting forth the operational issues that the knowledge society lays before higher education, it opens a pathway for future scholarship, dialogue and analysis across national, disciplinary and substantive frontiers.