Knowledge Communication

This paper is a thoroughly revised version of the manuscript of my inaugural professorial lecture delivered on March 16th of 2018, when I was called upon to take up the position as full professor at the department of Culture and Learning, Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities, University of Aalborg in Denmark. As this is a revised version of a talk given four years ago almost to the date, the reader will probably be able to spot remnants of its oral origins. But not only that. As much of what I envisioned in 2018 has been published one way of the other since then, the reader will also be invited to join me on a text archeological expedition. Much like Norman Mailer’s use of (rhetorical) “Time Machines” in his The Naked and the Dead, so will I be making extensive use of references and footnotes as rhetorical wormholes allowing the reader to oscillate between 2018 and today, 2022. This paper is an integration of ideas harvested from over a decade’s worth of research publications within the field that I have labelled Knowledge Communication. Basically, my interest in Knowledge Communication grew out of a curiosity as to the conceptual interfaces between communication and knowledge. As a point of entry suffice it to say that – as seen from the helicopter perspective – what sets Knowledge Communication apart from other related fields of communication studies is the fact that it takes its point of departure in the knowledge society. I.e., not in any specific discourse, neither in any one particular knowledge domain, and not even in communication per se, but in the context encompassing all of this, i.e., the knowledge society.  Structurally, this paper is divided into four sections. In the first section, I will sketch out my personal Bildungsweg and give a brief, narrative account of how my scholarly interests progressed from lexeme to communication. A Bildungsweg that eventually gave rise to a perspectivist outlook. In section 2, I will be presenting my take on the formative force of perspective as well as of interruptions of regress. The results, as it were, of applying interruptions of regress to the disciplines that I was socialized into, i.e., Language for Specific Purpose, Public Understanding of Science, and Knowledge Management, allows me to establish the three Cs of the Knowledge Communication research programme, i.e., communication, convergence, and constructivism, respectively. In section 3, I will present, discuss, and evaluate three widely acknowledged understandings of communication. My critical evaluation of existing understandings of what communication ‘is’ and what it ‘does’ serves as a stepping-stone for conceptualizing a novel take on communication as co-actional. An understanding of communication that is able to encompass the three Cs. In the final section, section 4, I propose fruitful avenues of research stemming from the Knowledge Communication research programme.