Michael Agar
Ethknoworks LLC

The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research conference in Banff this October was an interesting two days. Only a couple of people fell asleep during my plenary talk. A couple of quick comments. First of all, any of you out there who are doing applied research with social services, the metaphors of "knowledge transfer" and "knowledge translation" and the like are concepts to incorporate into your vocabulary if you haven't already. They're old news in the private sector—Peter Drucker's been writing about "knowledge workers" since at least the 1980s. But social services seems taken by the idea that what people know makes a difference and that the social distribution of that knowledge is where the action is.

What was especially interesting in the presentations I heard was how the concepts are neutral as to power. So on the one hand, "knowledge transfer" can mean learning from client perspectives how programs do and do not fit into problems and the life world and then working with them to change the program trajectory. On the other hand, "knowledge transfer" can mean how do I get those clients to do what I the expert tell them to do. Presentations at the conference moved to the tune of different positions on that scale. And people had good conversations about it, which made it a worthwhile conference, to put it mildly.