Calls for Abstracts

While the evidence base on successful practices in knowledge exchange is rapidly growing, much less attention has been given in the academic literature to documenting and reflecting on failures in trying to exchange different types of evidence between academics, practice partners and policy makers. However, learning from failures is just as important, if not more crucial, than celebrating successes.

List of potential topics:

We are inviting papers for a special issue in Evidence & Policy that provides practical examples of knowledge exchange failures and how participants dealt with these failures. This can includes updates on methodological and theoretical developments in documenting and reflecting on failures in knowledge exchange, and critical commentaries on the research impact agenda. We actively encourage joint submissions between academic researchers and practitioners to reflect, from each other’s perspectives, on experienced failures in knowledge exchange.

Potential questions that papers could address are:

Where and how does failure occur in knowledge exchange?
Who notices them and what is the impact for producers, users and exchangers of knowledge?
How to respond to failures, how can we prepare for them and learn from mistakes?
How can we research failed knowledge exchange practices and projects to document and reflect on the processes and distil learning from them to improve these practices?
What frameworks and theoretical concepts could help practitioners, policy makers and researchers to reflect on failures and identify learning from them that could be adopted in future knowledge exchange processes?
What is needed to create a ‘permission to fail’ culture in evidence producing, using and sharing organisations?