Introduction
In Canada and abroad, a growing emphasis is being placed upon the utilization and impact of health research. Scientists are increasingly required to include knowledge transfer plans in their research grant proposals, ensuring that their research is reaching appropriate audiences, and having a positive impact on decision making.
Knowledge Transfer: Some Assembly Required will bring together research scientists, physicians, healthcare managers, and graduate students to learn what tools and techniques can help facilitate KT, learn how to develop KT plans and how to assess them, and discover how we might measure the success of our KT efforts.
Building a KT plan? Creating a KT function within your organization? Can’t find the instructions?
Knowledge transfer sounds simple enough – use and share research evidence and other knowledge to make better decisions. However, we know it is not simple at all. Some assembly within our complex social and organizational contexts is required to transfer knowledge successfully. With the help of our expert speakers and each other, we will explore and gain an appreciation for complexity theory and complex adaptive systems and what this tells us about knowledge transfer or translation (KT).
You’ll also hear about the latest research and projects in KT and what the findings could mean to your practice or research. Maybe you have wisdom to share with others – the conference is an ideal place to share in that “knowledge transfer” and we will have many structured and unstructured opportunities for networking.
RTNA supports and encourages members to incorporate evidence into policy and practice, and to incorporate policy and practice considerations into research. To realize this vision, RTNA supports a culture of participation, networking, open dialogue, and mentorship. This culture creates an expectation of support for KT, while acknowledging the complexity of decisions. The RTNA 2009 conference is one way to help encourage and build that culture.
Knowledge Transfer: Some Assembly Required will take you from the theoretical to the practical and back again. We want to stimulate thinking on the complexity of knowledge transfer but also to expose you to the innovations, processes and practices that support and promote KT in your work and your organization. In the end, it’s about moving the KT agenda forward and helping research make a positive difference in people’s lives.
Keynote Speaker
Dr. Michael Agar, A Little Knowledge can be a Dangerous Thing
Dr. Agar will draw on cases from his own work with social service organizations, ethnographic practice, and complexity theory, to illustrate that KT varies along dimensions known in these fields, dimensions that are crucial for its success, failure, or mix of both at the same time. Examples of these dimensions include the observation that KT occurs in a social context whose features powerfully influence the outcome, and that the two sides of any transfer relation will always be different enough so that the knowledge will change shape in the transfer. He will advance the hypothesis that some variations in KT offer a greater chance of success than others, and the ethnographic attitude and organizational perspective that will make it more likely that collective learning and organizational implementation of KT will succeed.
Michael Agar received his Ph.D. in linguistic anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. An honorary Woodrow Wilson Fellow, NIH Career Award recipient, and currently Fulbright Senior Specialist, he is professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park, as well as an associate at Anthropocaos at the University of Buenos Aires. He was recently appointed Distinguished Scholar at the International Institute of Qualitative Methods at the University of Alberta. He now works independently as Ethknoworks LLC in northern New Mexico.
Sponsorship Opportunity
The RTNA is offering up to five sponsorship opportunities to attend Knowledge Transfer: Some Assembly Required. Sponsorships are for a maximum of $1000 (one thousand) and will be awarded according to the criteria set out in the application form. Please visit the RTNA sponsorship website to apply. Deadline extended to September 3
