Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the Shared Knowledges Workshops, a living lab for social innovation in Québec rural communities. Putting together researchers and local actors, these workshops focus on co-learning and the reflexivity at work in local communities.

Paper long abstract:

Living labs are most often organizational devices aimed at testing technological innovations in concrete situations before they are put on the market. This communication presents a different kind of living lab aimed at promoting the emergence of social innovations. The "Shared Knowledge Workshops" are a dispositif that seeks to understand the conditions for setting up innovative practices in rural Québec communities and to promote their transfer. These workshops focus on co-learning and the reflexivity at work in local communities. They have gone through three phases since 2012, each posing particular organizational and epistemological problems. This paper will present the ways this sharing of knowledges was organized at each of these stages and what were (and are) the innovative practices supporting this circulation of ideas.

The Workshops involve university researchers affiliated with the Center for Research on Social Innovations and local actors. They also involve national organizations whose mission is to disseminate the best practices and ensure their transfer. These participants meet on the basis of their experiences, their skills and their different missions. Each of these participants has their own sources and ways of legitimizing their knowledge. A primary difficulty is therefore to establish a concrete dialogue between these categories of actors; this involves interpersonal dimensions, but also political and epistemological ones. The fundamental challenge is to establish modalities of "association" (Latour) allowing the circulation of discourses and influencing their reception