Knowledge Communication: Contours of a Research Agenda

Knowledge Communication as a research field emerges as a response to the communicative core challenges of the knowledge society. At its center is the question of how to produce and transform specialized knowledge into interactions to gain value for this kind of knowledge. The field’s foundational concepts concern a transactional understanding of communication, an ideology of convergence between communicators and an appreciation of knowledge as construction. These stem from critical discussions of insights harvested from three parental disciplines: Language for Specific Purposes, Public Understanding of Science, and Knowledge Management. In their synthesis, these foundational concepts define Knowledge Communication as a means of strategic communication. In lieu of this, the research agenda of Knowledge Communication presents a novel prism through which to discern and investigate communicative core challenges of the knowledge society.