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Decentralized concentration through cyclical events: The geographies of academic conferences in urban and regional development and planning in Brazil, 2004–2013

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posted on 2020-03-02, 11:18 authored by Christiane Fabíola Momm, Heike JonsHeike Jons
This article advances research on the geographies of science, higher education, and knowledge production by analysing how the material, social, and intellectual geographies of academic conferences have shaped capacity-building in Brazil. Drawing upon debates about conferences as temporary and cyclical knowledge clusters, mobilities of knowledge, and triadic thought, we present the first longitudinal and comparative geographical analysis of academic conferences by examining Brazil's two major biannual conferences on urban and regional development and planning—the mobile ENANPUR and the stationary SIDR meetings—over a ten-year period. Our multi-dimensional and multi-scalar comparative analysis of ten events with more than 1600 conference papers and 2600 contributing authors reveals that in the context of an expanding Brazilian higher education system, both conferences acquired national reach of paper authors and study sites but with persisting east-west and south-north disparities. We discuss how ENANPUR and SIDR contributed to national capacity-building through 'decentralized concentration' of knowledge production and exchange, mitigating regional disparities via the decentralization of epistemic communities but reinforcing regional imbalances through the concentration of resources in conference locations, coastal states, and the two southern regions. We argue that conferences are an important tool for urban and regional development because they put places and people 'on the map' of epistemic communities and policy agendas, thereby helping to provide expertise for local and regional problem-solving.

Funding

Programme of Scholarships for Sandwich Doctorates Abroad (PDSE) by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES, Brazil), 2015–16; and School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University, UK.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Geoforum

Volume

112

Issue

June 2020

Pages

104 - 117

Publisher

Elsevier

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Rights holder

© Elsevier Ltd

Publisher statement

This paper was accepted for publication in the journal Geoforum and the definitive published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2020.01.004.

Acceptance date

2020-01-09

Publication date

2020-04-02

Copyright date

2020

ISSN

0016-7185

Language

  • en

Depositor

Prof Heike Jons. Deposit date: 28 February 2020

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