Short Abstract:

This roundtable will discuss the future of knowledge production and how the STS community can transform how they do research and can communicate it differently. Panelists share best practices, experiences, and speculations on publishing as a site of experimentation, activism, care, and engagement.

Long Abstract:

This roundtable will host a discussion on the future of academic knowledge production and will foreground speculation on how the STS community can transform how they do research and can communicate it differently. In a context in which research in the HSS is increasingly shaped by metricised assessment systems, funder mandates, and a commercial commodity-based publishing system, the panelists will explore how scholars and presses can promote more just alternatives for knowledge production. The focus of the discussion will be on experimentation, and how experimenting with monograph publishing can help imagine and bring into practice different publishing futures. This includes experiments with how publishing is organised and governed (e.g. with community-owned presses and knowledge infrastructures, and with forms of collectivisation), with the forms research is published in, and with conceptual understandings of what publishing is and how boundaries between publishing and research are increasingly blurring. The panelists will share research, best practices, experiences, and speculations on how to create more equitable publishing systems, and will explore with the audience how publishing can be a site of experimentation and activism, care and engagement. They will also share insights from their own experiments in open and processual, interactive and collaborative publishing, from database books to computational publications and combinatorial books. The panelists, comprising scholars, publishers, and software developers, together make up the Experimental Publishing Group, part of the Open Book Futures project, who have developed and are maintaining the Experimental Publishing Compendium. During the Q&A the audience will be invited to share ideas for potential experimental publishing projects. Together with the audience, the group will discuss the potentials of experimental forms of knowledge production, as well as barriers and inhibitions that the STS community currently faces in this context.

Panelists:

Janneke Adema

Rebekka Kiesewetter

Simon Bowie

Julien McHardy