This reading group accompanies the Post-Publishing research theme at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. In response to the ongoing enclosure of knowledge infrastructures and services, we will in this group discuss ways to reimagine the relationalities of academic publishing and how to experiment with open, not-for-profit, community-led models based on care and custodianship instead. This reading group is open for everyone to join.

We will be meeting monthly the next session will take place as on Tuesday 20 June, 19.00-21.00 BST in our Big Blue Button meeting room here:

This session will be hosted by the “Limits to Openness” Reading Group, part of a 2-year project “Ecologies of Dissemination, decolonial knowledge practice, feminist methodology, open access”, run by Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr. The reading group, from a commitment to sharing and re-use – beyond conventional copyright – is trying to come to terms with issues of universalism related to the idea of “openness”, as often presented in Open Content, Open Access, Free Culture and so forth. Does Free Culture perversely repeat here the colonial gesture of creating a ground zero for the circulation of knowledge as a “Free” object? What could decolonial, feminist conditions for re-use look like that would acknowledge entangled notions of authorship? More information on the Limits of Openness Reading Group, including future readings, can be found here: https://cryptpad.fr/pad/#/2/pad/edit/gVONhpg3GHaXufOn8jAsoRgI/

This session (Tuesday 20 June, 19.00-21.00 (BST)) will be the fourth hosted by the Limits to Openness Reading Group, for which we will be reading:

You can find and annotate the file in the files section in our HC group. To annotate each individual file with hypothes.is, open the file in your browser, copy the document link from hcommons, open hypothes.is in a separate tab, paste the document link into the “Paste Link” dialogue available on hypothes.is (next to Log In), and click on “Annotate”.

Feel free to browse through our Humanities Commons group and WordPress site for further discussion and sharing of ideas, and to share and distribute our readings:

https://hcommons.org/groups/commoning-the-means-of-knowledge-production/

We will be reading both texts put forward by group members, on topics such as the politics of open access publishing, commoning and the commons, shadow libraries, knowledge infrastructures, metrics and (e)valuation systems, care, experimental publications, and equity and diversity in publishing, as well as texts group members have authored themselves.

We decide collectively what to read next and how to structure the reading group going forward. During the next few sessions we will be reading the following texts (also available in our own Zotero library).

Reading group themes

Spring 2023: Hosted by the Limits to Openness Reading Group:

April 17th: Garza, Cristina Rivera (2020). The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020.

March 28th: Ken Chen, ‘Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show’, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 11 June 2015, https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1679647198-AuthenticityObsession-byKenChen.pdf

May 24th: Boatema Boateng, ‘Conclusion’, in The Copyright Thing Doesnt Work Here. Adinkra and Kente Cloth and Intellectual Property in Ghana (2011).  https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/T7eEQdnLeVdBhEYjtCCCOwYH/

June 20th:

Winter 2022-2023: Tactical Interventions

October 25th: Introduction to: Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009). https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1666019487-TacticalMedia-RitaRaley.pdf

December 1st:

January 18th:

Spring/Summer 2022 theme: Surveillance

May 19th: Pooley, J. (2022) ‘Surveillance Publishing’. The Journal of Electronic Publishing [online] 25 (1). available from <https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/jep/article/id/1874/> [29 April 2022]

June 22nd: The Library Freedom Project (n.d.) [online] Georgia Institute of Technology. available from <https://smartech.gatech.edu/handle/1853/54159> [20 April 2022]

September 21st: Birchall, C. (2018) Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data [online] Forerunners: Ideas First 20. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. available from <https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/shareveillance> [3 May 2022]

Fall/Winter 2021/22 theme: Metrics

January 26th: Marres, Noortje, and Sarah de Rijcke. ‘From Indicators to Indicating Interdisciplinarity: A Participatory Mapping Methodology for Research Communities in-the-Making’. Quantitative Science Studies, 29 June 2020, 1041–55. https://hcommons.org/?get_group_doc=1003678/1642176627-qss_a_00062.pdf

February 16th: Williamson, Ben. ‘Number Crunching: Transforming Higher Education into “Performance Data”’. Medium, 5 February 2019. https://medium.com/ussbriefs/number-crunching-transforming-higher-education-into-performance-data-9c23debc4cf7.

Piron, Florence, Tom Olyhoek, Ivonne Lujano Vilchis, Ina Smith, and Zakari Liré. 2021. ‘Trying to Say “No” to Rankings and Metrics: Case Studies from Francophone West Africa, South Africa, Latin America and the Netherlands’. In Socially Responsible Higher Education, 276–87. Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004459076_023.

March 16th:

June-Nov 2021: Meta-Reading

June 9th: Zaveri, Sonal. 2020. ‘Gender and Equity in Openness: Forgotten Spaces’. In Making Open Development Inclusive: Lessons from IDRC Research. MIT Press.

September 15th:

October 13th: Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press.

On the 13th of October, the CMKP reading group will host the Slow Reading Club, an initiative by the author, dancer, and choreographer Bryana Fritz and the artist Henry Andersen. They aim to question normalised ways of reading by complicating the relationships between text, readers, devices, configurations of space and time. By inviting Bryana and Henry the CMKP reading group aims to instigate a collective reflection and engagement around how scholars relate online (on so-called open platforms) through literacy practices (such as reading).

November 17th (at 5pm):

March-May 2021: Techno-ethics of Care

March 17th: Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria (2012) ‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care’ The Sociological Review 

April 14th: Aouragh, Miriyam et al., ‘Let’s First Get Things Done! On Division of Labour and Techno-Political Practices of Delegation in Times of Crisis’, The Fibreculture Journal, no. 26 (2015), https://doi.org/10.15307/fcj.26.196.2015

May 12th: Amrute, Sareeta ‘Of Techno-Ethics and Techno-Affects’, Feminist Review 123, no. 1 (1 November 2019): 56–73, https://doi.org/10.1177/0141778919879744.

Other suggested readings on this theme:

  • La Cour, Anders, Maria Kirstine Stilling, and Janus Hecht. ‘A Vanishing Act: The Magical Technologies of Invisibility in Care Work | Ephemera’. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 16, no. 2 (2016): 77–96.
  • Kvasny, Lynette and Duane Truex, ‘Information Technology and the Cultural Reproduction of Social Order: A Research Paradigm’, in Organizational and Social Perspectives on Information Technology: IFIP TC8 WG8.2 International Working Conference on the Social and Organizational Perspective on Research and Practice in Information Technology June 9–11, 2000, Aalborg, Denmark, ed. Richard Baskerville, Jan Stage, and Janice I. DeGross, IFIP — The International Federation for Information Processing (Boston, MA: Springer US, 2000), 277–93, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-35505-4_17
  • Papadimitropoulos, Evangelos, ‘Beyond Neoliberalism: Digitization, Freedom and the Workplace’, Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 19, no. 3 (2019): 565–89.

December 2020 – February 2021: Epistemic Justice

December 9th: Albornoz, Denise, Angela Okune, and Leslie Chan. ‘Can Open Scholarly Practices Redress Epistemic Injustice?’ In Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, edited by Martin Paul Eve and Jonathan Gray. The MIT Press, 2020. 

January 20th: Williams, Gareth. ‘The Subalternist Turn in Latin American Postcolonial Studies, or, Thinking in the Wake of What Went Down Yesterday (November 8, 2016)’. Política Común 10 (2016). 

February 17th:

  • Shearer, Kathleen, & Becerril-García, Arianna. (2021, January 7). Decolonizing Scholarly Communications through Bibliodiversity. Zenodo.
  • Meagher, K. (2021), Introduction: The Politics of Open Access — Decolonizing Research or Corporate Capture?. Development and Change.

Fundus of Topics & Readings

Infrastructures

Guldi, Jo. ‘Scholarly Infrastructure as Critical Argument: Nine Principles in a Preliminary Survey of the Bibliographic and Critical Values Expressed by Scholarly Web-Portals for Visualizing Data’. Digital Humanities Quarterly 014, no. 3 (1 September 2020).

Star, S.L. (2016) ‘The Ethnography of Infrastructure’. American Behavioral Scientist. doi 10.1177/00027649921955326

Genealogies of Openness

Moore, S.A. (2020) ‘Revisiting “the 1990s Debutante”: Scholar-Led Publishing and the Prehistory of the Open Access Movement’. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 71 (7), 856–866. https://doi.org/10.17613/41H8-J423

Kiesewetter, R. (2020). Undoing scholarship: Towards an activist genealogy of the OA movement. Tijdschrift Voor Genderstudies, 23(2), 113–130. https://doi.org/10.5117/TVGN2020.2.001.KIES

Meagher, K. (2021). Introduction: The Politics of Open Access — Decolonizing Research or Corporate Capture? Development and Change. https://doi.org/10.1111/dech.12630

Other

Bollier, David. ‘The Commons as a New | Old Paradigm for Governance, Economics and Policy – Part One’. Kosmos Journal (blog). Accessed 14 November 2020. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/the-commons-as-a-new-old-paradigm-for-governance-economics-and-policy-part-one/.

———. ‘The Commons as a New | Old Paradigm for Governance, Economics and Policy – Part Two’. Kosmos Journal (blog). Accessed 14 November 2020. https://www.kosmosjournal.org/article/the-commons-as-a-new-old-paradigm-for-governance-economics-and-policy-part-two/.

Beetham, H., Collier, A., Czerniewicz, L., Lamb, B., Lin, Y., Ross, J., Scott, A.-M., & Wilson, A. (2022). Surveillance Practices, Risks and Responses in the Post Pandemic University. Digital Culture & Education (ISSN: 1836-8301), 14(1). https://www.digitalcultureandeducation.com/volume-14-1. PDF file.

Dencik, L., & Sanchez-Monedero, J. (2022). Data justice. Internet Policy Review, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.14763/2022.1.1615

García Gago, Santiago. ‘Narratives for the Defense of the Digital Commons’. In Digital Activism, Community Media, and Sustainable Communication in Latin America, edited by Cheryl Martens, Cristina Venegas, and Etsa Franklin Salvio Sharupi Tapuy, 149–62. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45394-7_7.

Graham, M., & Dittus, M. (2022). Geographies of digital exclusion: Data and inequality. https://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/publications/geographies-of-digital-exclusion-data-and-inequality/

Huang, Chun-Kai, Cameron Neylon, Richard Hosking, Lucy Montgomery, Katie S Wilson, Alkim Ozaygen, and Chloe Brookes-Kenworthy. ‘Meta-Research: Evaluating the Impact of Open Access Policies on Research Institutions’. Edited by Julia Deathridge. ELife 9 (14 September 2020): e57067. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.57067.

Peters, Michael A. ‘Openness and the Intellectual Commons’. Open Review of Educational Research 1, no. 1 (1 January 2014): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.1080/23265507.2014.984975.