- Bridging the gap between knowledge production and social transformation
Academics in the modern world are increasingly concerned with how they function as real-world change agents and activists while simultaneously working as policymakers, knowledge producers, and administrative professionals. Especially in the Global South, a crucial concern is how academics and their research outputs directly contribute to social, cultural, and societal transformation through the ways that they analyse and interpret their societies and cultures.
For a long time, due to the influence of elite traditions and the dogma of the academia, academics have often been positioned as individuals who work primarily for the pursuit of knowledge and intellectual insight — contributing epistemologically to abstract ideas, theories, and ideological debates. This model largely reflects a European tradition of modern academia. However, increasing attention is now being given to the gap between research and practice, and to the question of how knowledge can genuinely contribute to real-world transformation.
This concern becomes particularly important when societies continue to suffer from political, social, cultural, and feudalistic problems despite the production of vast amounts of academic knowledge. One of the major reasons why countries in the Global South, such as Sri Lanka, continue to lag behind many countries in the Global North and other developing nations is the widening gap between research and researchers’ genuine involvement in social, cultural, economic, and industrial transformation.
Many researchers conduct studies primarily for institutional promotions, prestige, recognition, and personal academic advancement rather than for meaningful societal contribution. As a result, research knowledge often remains confined within universities and academic publications without being effectively applied to real-world transformation. Consequently, deeply rooted social, cultural, institutional, political, colonial, and feudal hegemonies continue to dominate society, preventing substantial development, freedom, and liberation from existing social injustices.
More specifically, institutional colonial mentalities and divisive hegemonic values and norms continue to remain unquestioned. These structures often limit liberty, equality, and freedom by denying people equal opportunities and dignified lives free from discrimination and prejudice.
One such example is that recently, our State universities have increasingly followed globally reputed, world-ranked, or “world-class university” competition models. As a result, universities in the State sector are being pushed towards becoming world-class universities by improving their positions in global ranking systems through Web of Science, Scopus-indexed, and other reputed research publications, as well as concepts such as the “green university.” However, there is far less concern for human-centred educational values, socio-cultural well-being, humane and relaxed learning environments, and the overall quality of human life within universities. There is also little space left to challenge colonial and feudal hegemonic barriers, divisions, and hierarchies that exist between academics and non-academic staff, within student life, and in relation to academic freedom, free thinking, and liberty in academic and professional work styles.
Today, universities are primarily concerned with achieving better rankings, yet the cultures of their societies, institutional reforms, and how research contributes locally to improving living standards and addressing societal corruption, discrimination, attitudes, and thought patterns continue to lag. One reason is the growing gap between research and the researcher. In other words, although researchers conduct excellent research, the extent to which their studies genuinely connect with and contribute to transforming existing societal, cultural, and institutional problems is rarely addressed in practice.
Furthermore, within the contemporary research practice, the researcher often remains disconnected from both their research and their academic teaching sphere, as though they exist in two separate destinations. Researchers rarely reflect on how their own lives, academic expertise, and analytical rigour could be meaningfully combined to contribute to their research perspectives and outputs. Such knowledge and lived experiences could play a significant role in addressing and challenging societal and institutional issues from within. Yet, in many ways, we continue to follow colonial institutional politics.
On top of that, those who publish in Web of Science or Scopus-indexed journals often gain greater institutional recognition within local universities competing in the global “world-class” university race. This success gradually reproduces hegemonic hierarchies, political practices of power, and unequal forms of academic agency, while leaving little room for the deconstruction of colonial administrative mentalities and institutional structures.
At the same time, universities have enthusiastically embraced avant-garde concepts such as modernity, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, intersectionality, and other contemporary intellectual trends within their curricula and institutional policies. However, in many cases, these concepts remain more symbolic than genuinely transformative. Their knowledge production is rarely translated into meaningful institutional, societal, or cultural change capable of eliminating long-existing injustices, discrimination, suffering, and forms of oppression experienced by people within these systems.
Modern cultural and critical theory increasingly emphasises the role of the researcher as an activist, questioning how research can be genuinely connected to the researcher’s own life, society, culture, and institutional realities. It calls attention to the ways in which societies and institutions continue to be shaped and threatened by colonial and feudal restrictions, divisive politics, and entrenched power hierarchies that sustain institutional dominance and hegemonic control. In this sense, research should not merely function as an academic exercise for rankings and recognition, but as a transformative intellectual practice that critically challenges and dismantles oppressive institutional cultures and inherited colonial structures.
In this context, one of the major directions of contemporary research traditions is the question of how an academic or researcher can become a genuine real-world change agent and activist. This involves examining how their institutional and intellectual research trajectory can directly contribute to addressing the existing politics of power and agency within their own institutions and societies. It also concerns how researchers meaningfully combine their authentic lived experiences — including the ways that they themselves have suffered within colonial, bureaucratic, hegemonic, and feudal systems — with their academic genealogy, intellectual formation, and research practices.
From family structures to workplaces, and from social life to institutional culture, these experiences shape the researcher’s consciousness, identity, and analytical perspective. In this sense, research becomes not merely a scholarly exercise, but a form of critical and reflective intervention into the researcher’s own mind, life, and the wider body of social, cultural, and institutional practices.
One of the most significant developments in this area is the emergence of activist-oriented research methods such as autoethnography, particularly within critical cultural and qualitative research traditions. Autoethnography positions the researcher not simply as an observer, but as both the subject and the interpreter of the research itself. It is a deeply reflexive methodology that critically examines the researcher’s own mind, lived experiences, emotions, social positioning, and institutional encounters as valid sources of knowledge production.
In this regard, autoethnography intersects with the concepts of emic and etic perspectives derived from socio-cultural anthropology. The emic perspective refers to understanding social reality from within one’s own lived experiences, where the researcher’s own mind, body, memories, and experiences become the primary dataset. In contrast, the etic perspective positions the researcher as an outsider who analytically observes subjects and social realities from a distance.
The emic researcher, particularly through autoethnographic and activist scholarship, offers a more authentic and transformative contribution to society and culture. Such research is neither purely personal nor entirely impersonal. Rather, it functions as a therapeutic and political process through which researchers critically confront the ways that they have long been shaped, marginalised, discriminated against, criminalised, or psychologically disciplined by colonial, feudal, patriarchal, bureaucratic, and institutional structures.
Through this process, the researcher directly speaks truth from the very beginning of the research journey — whether through academic publications indexed in Web of Science or Scopus, newspaper articles, public lectures, social media engagement, classroom teaching, or everyday institutional interactions. The central aim is not simply publication or career advancement, but social transformation and the dismantling of oppressive institutional and cultural systems.
Academics must increasingly function as social changers, truth-openers, and activists. Research and the researcher should not exist as two separate destinations. Instead, the researcher’s own lived experiences, social struggles, institutional encounters, and intellectual reflections should become part of the research itself.
In this sense, emic and autoethnographic approaches are especially valuable because they help expose and challenge deeply rooted social, cultural, institutional, and psychological problems while contributing directly to humane and socially meaningful transformation.
This is particularly important in the Global South, where societies continue to suffer from colonial-feudal bureaucratic hegemonies, heteronormative administrative cultures, and oppressive institutional governance structures. In many cases, the so-called “world-class university” model promoted through Web of Science, Scopus rankings, and global academic competition reproduces Western colonial business-oriented knowledge systems rather than genuinely addressing local social realities and injustices.
Today however, we live in a digitally networked, interconnected, pluralistic, and collaborative world that increasingly values interdisciplinary, liberal, and collective modes of working and thinking. Therefore, universities should move beyond rigid colonial disciplinary divisions, institutional compartments, and hierarchical systems of knowledge control. Instead, academics and researchers should extend their hearts, minds, and hands towards sharing their lived experiences, critical reflections, and social engagements to transform society and address the many ways in which people continue to be exploited, silenced, tortured, and marginalised by feudal and hegemonic systems of power within education, culture, and institutional life.
The writer is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Kelaniya University’s Mass Communication Department
---------
The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of this publication