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- Convenors:
-
Gabriele Alex
(University of Tuebingen)
Anne Dippel (Braunschweig University of Art (HBK))
Matthias Harbeck (UB der Humboldt-Universität)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
Open Science has become the dominant model for knowledge production with incentives, policies and platforms advocating for Open Access and Open Research Data. But who controls, profits from, or possibly misuses this knowledge? What does this mean for anthropological ethics?
Long Abstract:
Open Science has become the paradigm for academic Western knowledge production. Science policy makers, research funding agencies, universities and museums are strongly advocating the cause for Open Research Data and Open Access publications. Researchers are hoping for a broader circulation of their ideas. Platforms and online-archives are becoming the standard for knowledge production and circulation. Humanities and social sciences are put under pressure to align with publication and data sharing standards originally stemming from STEM disciplines.
At first glance it seems we entered an ideal era of academic knowledge production. Knowledge of and about the world, often produced with public funds, is given back to the world with considerable scope for re-usage.
In which kind of hierarchical and ontological structures, economies, and accompanying technologies (e.g. AI) are these commoning processes entangled? Whose knowledge or property is at stake, who decides about and finances it, who profits from Open Science at the end and who might lose out? Who might (ab)use open knowledge and its tools for what purposes? These issues become especially important for Anthropology, with anthropological knowledge production being concerned with people’s lifeworlds, shared with researchers.
We invite everyone who engages in questions of ‘digital care’: How do forms of consent account for the new distribution and usage systems into which the (data) publications are transformed in the wake of Open Science? What kind of different (moral) economies go along with Open Science in the anthropologies and what are the rules, practices, structures and technologies making them?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This contribution discusses examples of the digitalization of ethnographic works from the early twentieth century and highlights the possibilities for commoning such century-old knowledge as well as associated (ethical) risks.
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution aims to discuss opportunities for knowledge-sharing and ethical dimensions in the digitalization of ethnographic books from the early twentieth century. An increasing number of these publications is digitalized and therewith made available and sometimes even searchable online. The digitalization either takes place in the context of large commercial projects (such as the publication of books for which the copyright expired through Google Books) or in dedicated scholarly projects that aim to make this specific knowledge commonly available. These publications are at the same time early representatives of our discipline and products of the (colonial) times in which they were written. In the present-day, their content can be experienced as both valuable and disturbing, especially the books written by early ethnologists who were also implicated in colonial governance and ideologies. The publication of these books can provide opportunities for contemporary communities to learn more about their past, as a supplement to oral history and archives with written material, and can provide anthropologists with an opportunity to work through the history of the discipline. At the same time, a simple digitalization of these books without the involvement of the (descendant) communities it concerns and without providing context runs the risks of reproducing colonial patterns and narratives in the present-day.
By focusing on several concrete recent examples of the digital publication of ethnographic works from the early twentieth century, this contribution aims to discuss foreseen and unforeseen effects of these attempts to common century-old knowledge.
Contribution short abstract:
Open Access has transformed scholarly publishing and created new possibilities. However, its entanglement with digital technologies, used to accelerate research and boost efficiency, raises ethical and epistemic concerns, particularly for data-sensitive fields like Cultural and Social Anthropology.
Contribution long abstract:
The transformation of scholarly publishing through Open Access (OA) has created new possibilities – while also introducing new dilemmas. Initially an activist movement challenging publisher monopolies, OA has become mainstream, broadly supported by policymakers, funders, and institutions within a broader Open Science agenda.
The internet thrives on the fantasy of a wide dissemination of ideas; Open Science builds on this premise. But does the availability of publications and research data truly democratize knowledge?
As critics have noted, since its early declarations, OA has been shaped by a techno-deterministic development narrative that persists despite decades of anti-colonial critique and assumes technological progress naturally resolves global inequities. Moreover, OA today is often aligned with capitalist ideologies of growth and efficiency, fostering a logic of evaluation that reduces scholarly impact to quantifiable metrics (Haider 2018).
This raises concerns for Cultural and Social Anthropology: How can we reconcile research ethics with unforeseen effects of digital transformation? How can we address fears of misuse of information about research contexts and informants’ life worlds? How can researchers and informants be protected from persecution, given the global rise of right-wing ideologies? How can we safeguard our understanding of knowledge without fading into invisibility? What forms of expertise, care, and critical reflection are necessary to open space for alternative realizations of Open Science that challenge rather than reproduce existing power structures?
We address these questions by sharing insights from our work on the OA transformation of the Journal for European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis in the DFG project EthnOA.