Short Abstract

Open Science (OS) promises accessible research. We explore the politics and affects of OS on ethnographic knowledges and practices. How does it impact their relationality, sensitivity and co-constructedness and transform field relationships, anonymisation, access and long-term data infrastructures?

Long Abstract

Open Science calls for making scientific knowledge, publications, data, and technologies more open, transparent, and accessible. It promises to democratise science, enabling new forms of collaboration, and making research findings accessible to broader audiences. Do these promises hold for anthropology’s epistemologies, which understand knowledge as relational and co-constructed, where data can be sensitive and difficult to share, and where power relations are known to shape the research process?

This workshop starts from the premise that opening up ethnographic research is neither a neutral endeavour nor merely a technical practice. Rather, it encompasses processes and practices that set affects, relationships, and ethnographic research in motion, and may reproduce colonial continuities of power and control. These affective dynamics are differently experienced and negotiated by researchers and research participants and those designing Open Science infrastructures and technologies.

We welcome contributions that explore what Open Science sets in motion in ethnographic research—and the affects this creates. We ask what openness can mean in ethnographic research and how/if ethnographic data and findings can be made more accessible.

To what extend might openness transform ethnographic research itself: relationships with participants and the field, research practices, digital tools and methods we use, and the status of shared ethnographic material?

What possibilities, paths, and challenges might emerge, particularly regarding anonymity, authority and control?

How should infrastructures be designed to make ethnographic knowledge, data, and findings more accessible in the long term while ensuring that conditions of access reflect the sensitivities and relationships from which such knowledge emerges?