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- Convenors:
-
Matthias Harbeck
(UB der Humboldt-Universität)
Sabine Imeri (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Igor Eberhard (Ethnographic Dataarchive Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
The panel critically examines promises/tensions of open science in anthropology, addresses ethical and political dilemmas in data management and open access, the role of AI in handling ethnographic data, and encourages reflection on how openness can enable more responsible knowledge practices.
Long Abstract
In times of growing social and political polarisation, calls from various quarters for open, transparent, and accessible research are growing louder. “Open Science” promises to share knowledge democratically, promote scientific collaboration, and make research results accessible to a wider audience. But what can “openness” mean in the context of anthropological research, which deals with sensitive data, relational knowledge, and asymmetrical power relations?
This panel invites critical reflections on the possibilities and tensions of open science within anthropology. We want to explore the ethical, epistemological, and political implications of open research practices: How can open access and research data management be balanced with obligations of confidentiality, anonymity, and accountability to research partners? Who can actually gain access? What role do colonial histories and knowledge regimes play in shaping the discussion of openness, and how could concepts such as the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance (Collective Benefit, Authority to Control, Responsibility, Ethics) provide guidance here?
At the same time, new digital infrastructures and AI-based tools can change the way how ethnographic data, texts, and images are stored, analyzed, and shared. These technologies raise old questions about data sovereignty, bias, authorship, and consent in new ways.
We invite colleagues to contribute theoretical reflections, methodological discussions, or empirical case studies that shed light on the ambivalences, challenges, and potentials of open science from an anthropological perspective. The aim is to create a space for an reflexive dialogue on how openness can go beyond reproducing inequalities to foster more equitable and responsible forms of knowledge production—especially in a polarized world.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
The study of “found data”—anonymous digital traces—challenges authorship, ownership, and research ethics. Analysing Schuldenvrij (a Dutch debt forum), we found interpreting fragmented 'noisy data' demands rigor and ethical reflection, reshaping authorship as collective and distributed.
Paper long abstract
Anthropological discussions on open science and digital infrastructures frequently overlook the importance of "found data"—digital traces that lack identifiable authorship. This omission is notable, as such data challenges conventional understandings of authorship, ownership, and ethical responsibility in research.
To address this gap, we examine the Dutch online forum Schuldenvrij (‘Debtfree’), a public platform where individuals anonymously share their personal financial struggles. The forum’s recent removal from public access raises critical questions about data governance, accountability, and the ethical complexities of preserving digital archives.
Our analysis of the Schuldenvrij materials demonstrates that rendering found data legible demands substantial intellectual effort. Anthropologists must interpret and theorize ambiguous, fragmented, or incomplete materials—what we term "noisy data." This process requires not only analytical rigor but also a deep engagement with the authorship of anonymized, user-generated content.
Drawing on a hermeneutic perspective, we argue that anthropologists studying found digital data add an additional layer of meaning to these materials. In doing so, they expand traditional notions of authorship, shifting toward distributed and collective models that challenge conventional ideas of originality, ownership, and copyright.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on ethnographic research within the EthnOA project, this paper presents preliminary insights from interviews exploring how “openness” is negotiated in everyday practice. What practices, tensions, and questions emerge when promises of democratization meet the realities of implementation?
Paper long abstract
The Open Access transformation promises democratized knowledge, increased visibility, and innovative publication formats. But how do these promises translate into practice? What labor, negotiations, and dilemmas emerge when actors implement openness in concrete institutional settings?
This paper shares preliminary results from ethnographic research conducted within the DFG-funded EthnOA project, which supports the Open Access transformation of three German anthropological journals while building sustainable infrastructures. Through qualitative interviews with diverse actors involved in the Open Access transformation, we examine how "openness" is negotiated as continuous design work extending beyond mere technical implementation – revealing it as both infrastructural labor and normatively grounded political practice.
Critical scholarship has raised important questions about Open Access: Does visibility always serve emancipatory aims, or can it create new vulnerabilities? Do digital infrastructures encourage acceleration and quantification? Can standardized platforms accommodate diverse forms of knowledge production? Rather than answering these questions theoretically, we let the actors speak – foregrounding the voices and experiences of those doing the work of transformation. These preliminary ethnographic fragments reveal openness not as a neutral technical achievement but as an ongoing process embedded in larger struggles over knowledge infrastructures and publishing ecosystems.
By presenting work in progress, we invite collective reflection on which forms of Open Science we want to shape, and how anthropology’s critical-reflexive approach might contribute to more careful, responsible practices of scholarly communication.
Paper short abstract
The paper discusses the challenges faced by a project, which aims to diversify (migration) history through building a digital oral history archive. Increased visibility comes along with increased vulnerability. Open data comes along with loss of control. Selective story telling has to be dealt with.
Paper long abstract
WHO CARED is a community based project to collect and make public the stories of nurses, who were recruited from India to West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Starting point of the project was the near invisibility of this migration history in Germany and the gaps in institutionalised archives. The project supports the children of the nurses to interview their mothers, it presents curated videos on who-cared.com to the general public and the full interviews on oral-history.digital for researchers. It thus intervenes on how history is told not only with respect to content but also to form and technological infrastructure.
The paper discusses which challenges the aimed for visibility poses to the project. In particular there is a tension between wanting these stories to be seen and not wanting to be harmed by going public. Accordingly, the interviewees, the interviewers and the project all need to decide what stories are told and what is presented how. Since independent of the attributed licenses the videos, once they are put online, cannot be controlled effectively anymore, their usage for example by anti-migration activists have to be taken into account. The openness of the archive thus will necessarily result in a particular selective story telling and will leave gaps in particular with respect to those aspects, where vulnerability is feared. The paper will provide reflections from a project in process. The first videos should go online in spring 2026.
Paper short abstract
This paper draws on waqf (Islamic endowment) and ethics of trusteeship to develop archiving methods that balance ethics and sustainable impact within European secular academia. I address gaps in open science and universal legal frameworks through fieldwork with nazers (trustees) in Saudi Arabia.
Paper long abstract
This paper explores waqf [Islamic endowment] and ownership ethics of trusteeship to balance ethical conduct and sustainable academic outcomes from archiving within a secular academic infrastructure in Europe. I do so to situate my ethical practice in relation to my positionality and my Muslim participants, and to address gaps in the FAIR principles and open science that promote sustainable and impactful epistemological contribution through data access and reuse without sufficient ethical consideration. I develop methodologies to move beyond universalised legal guidelines applied to students and research communities with different cosmologies, such as the GDPR’s contradiction with the Islamic understanding of the continuity of personhood after death. Drawing on waqf’s inclusivity and its role in enabling knowledge to endure in the medieval Islamic world, grounded in a relation to the physical world as an amanah [trust] with a divine presence, I engage a concept of sustainability linked to an Islamic cosmology of posthumous continuity. I adopt this trusteeship paradigm to challenge contemporary possessive ‘data ideology’ that stands in the way of the inclusive access promoted in open science.
While the dead endower in Islam retains agency through continued world-making in waqf, I draw a parallel with archiving as a form of sustainable knowledge-making by the deceased researcher. Based on fieldwork with Saudi Arabian waqf nazers [trustees] and other experts, I develop procedures for securing long-term consent for ethical reuse beyond the lifetimes of informants. I draw on waqf practices to protect collections from ethical gaps in existing legal frameworks.
Paper short abstract
Social & Cultural Anthropology faces distinct ethical challenges in open access. Researchers often use restrictive licensing to address research and publication ethics. I argue, however, that licensing is not the right moment to handle and ‘fix’ such ethical considerations.
Paper long abstract
Regarding open access, researchers from Social & Cultural Anthropology face different ethical challenges than colleagues from other disciplines. Sensible research contexts, knowledge production that is considered shared and communal and the discussion of private, secret or even sacred knowledges and objects urge them to reconsider the impact of academic publishing.
Open access publishing goes hand in hand with open licensing, usually through Creative Commons licenses, that offer standardized options to give permission while protecting copyright. Open licensing thus reserves certain rights while inviting everyone to share and, depending on the license, adapt and update, translate and rework even for commercial purposes.
More than two years working on open access in SCA showed me that ethical concerns within the discipline—alongside concerns about recent developments in text and data mining and GenAI—often lead researchers to adopt protective stances through restrictive licensing, sometimes even considering closed-access publication. “Even [the license] CC BY-NC may not offer sufficient protection from exploitative use…” expresses the disappointed hope to safeguard through restrictive licensing.
Against this impulse, I argue that licensing might be the wrong moment to handle and ‘fix’ those pressing ethical questions. While it is important to know different license options and to choose a license that suits the work and respects the rights and interests of all of its creators, the underlying considerations and decisions need to be addressed at different—usually earlier—stages of research. Restrictive licensing—while occasionally justified—cannot substitute for conversations we have failed to have.