Manifesto

1. Our Moment- Our Time

Affirming that, the purpose of knowledge is to enhance the well being of all people and not just for economic growth or intellectual property rights,

With deep conviction, that there is a spirituality of knowledge as a way of being, living and learning

Aware that, wherever in this remarkable, contradictory and troubled planet that we live, work, love, struggle, resist and survive, we face a number of persistent and complex common realities including:

• Growing inequality between and within nations
• The irreversible destruction of our biosphere,
• Increasing levels of violence against women in all societies and all classes,
• Loss of our global treasury of intangible cultural heritage of Indigenous languages, stories, songs and ways of knowing, 
• Increased fear across social sectors for security and well-being.

2. Knowledge, Society and Power

Cognisant that all knowledge is intimately linked with power, and that the questions of whose knowledge counts and how knowledge can be linked with social change and enlarging the public good is critical to our shared future, we call for:

• Knowledge workers in social movements, civil society organisations and higher education institutions to contribute to the progressive resolution of the critical challenges facing our communities, our nations and the world,
• Recognition of civil society and social movement structures and formations as sources of knowledge co-creation and repositories of valuable forms of knowledge,
• Increased opportunities for all students to be able to learn about democratic approaches to research in theory and in practice, 
• Deepening our understanding of knowledge democracy as a fundamental framework for transformative change.

3. Structures of democratic knowledge

Convinced that new forms of knowledge legitimation in support of the public good require new support and enabling regimes we urge the:

• Creation of university-wide and discipline specific structures to facilitate community-university research partnerships,
• Creation of policies and procedures within all higher education institutions to recognise excellence in community based research as integral to an academic career,
• Expansion of granting council and research funding agencies investment in civil society led research and community-university partnership research,
• Support of open access knowledge systems, respecting diversity and pluralism in sites, modes and ways of knowledge production as a building block of open and inclusive societies 
• Support to civil society for synthesing its own practitioner knowledge and spaces for creative and respectful engagement academic knowledge forms,
• Strengthening of links between the spaces of democratic practice within universities such as community service learning, knowledge mobilization, and community based research,
• Decolonization of higher education academic programming through an explicit recognition of multiple epistemologies and multiple forms of representing knowledge