With apologies for cross-posting Radical
Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism
Date: 10 and 11 April 2025 Location: The Milstein Room, Cambridge
University Library (UK), and online Schedule: https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/schedule/ The third
instalment of the Radical Open Access Conference focuses on
the relationship between openness and activism, exploring what
is next for radical forms of OA by addressing questions around
publishing and social justice that those connected to the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC)
have been putting forward for years. Join us for
two days of critical discussion about creating a more diverse
and equitable future for open access. More
details and registration: https://radicaloa.postdigitalcultures.org/conferences/radicaloa3/ (please
note the separate registration for each day) Speakers: Élisabeth Arsenault, Sarah-Anne
Arsenault, Lucy Barnes, Simon Batterbury, Marc Herbst, Rupert
Gatti, Angela Okune, Charmaine Pereira, Jeff Pooley, Ela
Przybyło, Magalí Rabasa, Ash Sharma, Stevphen Shukaitis,
Lauren Smith, Alessandra Tosi, Vincent van Gerven Oei Journals
and Presses: darkmatter, Engaging Science, Technology, and
Society (ESTS),
ÉSBC, Feminist Africa, Feral Feminisms, Journal of Political Ecology, Journal of Radical Librarianship, mediastudies.press, Minor Compositions, Open Book Publishers, punctum books, The Journal of Aesthetics &
Protest Conference Concept The first Radical Open Access Conference in
2015 started from the position of neoliberalism’s co-option of
open access (OA) publishing as just another profitable business
model and instead put forward a different radical and
scholar-led vision for OA. This led to the formation of the Radical Open Access Collective (ROAC),
a community of scholar-led, not-for-profit presses, journals,
and other OA projects with ‘a shared investment in taking back
control over the means of knowledge production in order to
rethink what publishing is and what it can be.’ Although a focus
on more resilient and ethical scholar-led forms of OA publishing
remains crucial in the ROAC, ten years later many connected to
the original ROAC community have moved beyond openness and
towards other goals, especially now that OA publishing is
increasingly becoming the standard. In this context, the
question is less about openness as such and more about openness
for whom and at what cost. At the same time, radical OA projects
and communities promoting alternative and experimental forms of
publishing have converged with various digital activisms and
social movements organising around intersectional feminist,
post- hegemonic, and ecologically-minded perspectives. In these
contexts, the social activities making up publishing have become
a space for critical reflection on and intervention into
persistent power asymmetries in academia and traditional
divisions of labour in publishing. They also have been connected
with broader concerns of ‘how to work and live together’ in a
world marked by humanitarian and planetary emergencies (Kiesewetter, 2024). With this third instalment of the Radical
Open Access Conference, we seek to explore what is next for
radical forms of OA and, once again, discuss questions around
publishing and social justice that those connected to the ROAC
have been putting forward for years, while reclaiming ownership
over the means of knowledge production and working towards
different activist goals. As a mutually-supportive community
that brings together and is made up of scholar-led, not for
profit publishers, journals, and other OA projects, as well as
theorists, scholars, librarians, technology specialists,
activists and others, from different fields and backgrounds,
both inside and outside of the university, the collective has
always attempted to strengthen alliances between OA and related
struggles – including those that are opening out from OA (Kember, 2014) and are exploring how
academic writing and publishing can both contribute to and be
itself a form of social justice activism. Going back to what we
have explored in previous conferences and extending from there:
how have or can radical OA projects establish what Laclau and
Mouffe called ‘chains of equivalence' (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985) with other movements and
struggles for social justice through their publishing
activities? And in what way can we establish these chains of
equivalence, or how can we scale small (Adema and Moore, 2021), while at
the same time retaining a plurality of open movements, theories,
and philosophies, which may at times conflict and contradict one
another, but which can nevertheless contribute to the
construction of a common, oppositional horizon? Against this background, Radical Open Access III: From Openness to Social Justice Activism aims to showcase a variety of alternative ways of organising around scholarly publishing as they unfold through social activities such as writing, editing, translating, maintaining, and archiving across disciplinary, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. It includes contributions from the radical OA publishing community but also aims to reflect insights from adjacent fields and struggles, for example from experiments in arts and humanities scholarship, digital activism, and social movement organising.
As part of this conference, we seek to
explore questions such as:
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