Digging Deeper

Ecologies of Dissemination: Digging Deeper

Here we collected some key texts and podcasts for those who want to dig deeper. They are drawn from the one-year "Limits to Openness" Reading Group that explored issues of universalism related to the idea of openness, as often presented in Open Content, Free Culture and dominant Open Access publishing. Drawn from different fields, such as philosophy, black studies, free culture, critical race studies, critical IP, among others, the range of texts and podcasts approach the question of how would decolonial, feminist practices of reuse look like from different perspectives. We include here also selected texts that informed the prompts or conversations. An index or reference list can be found under Reused Resources.

Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show

Ken Chen (11 June 2015) ‘Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show’, Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

Starting from Kenneth Goldsmiths' appropriation of the autopsy of police-murdered Michael Brown as a piece of conceptual poetry, Ken Chen asks challenging questions about the way this incident was not an accident. From reading this text, we understood that an anti-colonial, feminist practice of Open Content would need to formulate “a politics of appropriation”. Without it, it risks repeating the colonial/white (?) gesture of treating the world as resource, as primary, “raw” material, dry text, pure content, pure evidence, anthropology), to render it dumbly into things, mere material to own; a site of violation; or simply something to instrumentalize."

“What is the line separating one writer as a poet of witness and another as a poet of expropriation — and what prevents either from being a producer of the kitsch of atrocity? Conceptual Poetry has no politics of appropriation. One could say that the movement’s major theoretical texts spend significantly more time discussing, say, John Cage, Sol Le Witt, and Walter Benjamin than they do the power relations of cultural exchange.”

The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation

Cristina Rivera Garza (2020). The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press.

Even if for Garza, disappropriation is based in writerly practice, what would disappropriation mean for other types of creative practice? Could Garza's description of disappropriative practices help us formulate a politics of re-use?

”Disappropriation critiques the appropriation of other’s voices for its own benefit, but instead: exposes the unequal exchange of labour that happens when collective experience is used for individual gain. What disappropriation does, is to restore the plurality of writing.”

How deep is your source?

Aymeric Mansoux​​​​​​​ (2013), How deep is your source?

In the text “How deep is your source” (2013), Aymeric Mansoux tracks the history of open source software and reflects on the translation of free software licences applied to the field of cultural production. He reflects on this through practical aspects and touches on the problems with a simplifying and universal one-size-fits-all approach.

Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)

Mckittrick, Katherine (2021) “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor).” In Dear Science and Other Stories, 14–32. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

In this chapter, Mckittrick reflects on how research is animated by citations, endnotes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, texts and narratives, parentheses, sources, and pages. How to reference Black thought and methodologies, that resist being contained within text?

The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here

Boatema Boateng (2011), “The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here”. University of Minnesota Press.

We selected this text because of its critical approach of the issues that arise when a globalized, US-based Intellectual Property regime is imported and applied to cultural production in Ghana. Boateng brings perspectives from African Diaspora studies and Critical Race Theory to question the way copyright follows the fault lines of nation, gender, and race to regulate and produce both individual subjects and certain types of knowledge. Boatema Boateng is a legal scholar who has been contributing to the Critical Race IP community, a body of work that we have wanted to pay attention to as part of the reading group. While having been mainly developed by scholars in the US context, the understanding that race is a social construct embedded in legal systems and policies, seems crucial to figure out how it then gets embedded in Intellectual Property, especially, of course, in the context of Open Access, appropriation and reuse.

Intellectual property is based on understandings of the temporal and social contexts of cultural production that are bound up with modernity. These include the liberal concept of the autonomous, rational individual as the basic unit of society and the actions of that individual as distinct from the actions of all others. As a cultural producer, this individual is the essential subject of intellectual property law—the male or masculinized author or inventor whose ability and right to separate his work from all other such work and make proprietary claims over it is a function of his status as a modern subject. This separation is also temporal in demarcating the creative work of the individual from that of not only living authors but also deceased ones. (page 167)

Cross-reading + cross hearing:  

• Critical Race IP SoundCloud: UCLA, Season 6, Episode 4 (2021) Exploring Critical Race IP. With Dean Deidre Keller and Kimberly Tignor
  
• Anjali Vats, Deirdre A. Keller (2018)​​​​​​​, Critical Race IP, PDF
• Harris, Cheryl (1993) Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review, PDF
  
• Harris, Cheryl (2020) Reflections on Whiteness as Property, Harvard L Review 134 PDF

Self-Review of Citational Practice

Angela Okune (2019), Self-Review of Citational Practice. PDF

Angela Okune's list of questions is very helpful to reflect the potential biases of our own citational practices before publishing a text or other work. See also, Angela Okune, LSE Blogpost 'Decolonizing scholarly data and publishing infrastructures' (2019)

Licensing and Licentiousness

Abigail De Kosnik (2016) “Licensing and Licentiousness.” In Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, 307–14. The MIT Press. PDF

This chapter on rogue reuse in fan fiction might help to think about what positions might give us confidence to practice reuse and decide that it is OK. On what ground can we make such decisions? How is responsibility for gatekeeping and custodianship taken up? From commitment to loyalty, a sense of belonging and licentiousness (rather than licencing), Abigail De Kosnik explores where ethical authority could be situated, beyond individual authorship.

R-Words: Refusing Research

Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014), “R-Words: Refusing Research”. In Humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, pages 223-248. PDF

Eve Tuck' and Wayne Yang's text offers a way to think about the many reasons for not doing research, not sharing or not reusing materials. The text is written by and for practitioners in social sciences. Can we translate the cases and claims made in the text to cultural practice (in and outside academia) and see in which ways they could help to articulate a feminist and decolonial approach to a practice of sharing and reuse?

”It needs to be said that we are not arguing for silence. Stories are meant to be passed along appropriately, especially among loved ones, but not all of them as social science research. Although such knowledge is often a source of wisdom that informs the perspectives in our writing, we do not intend to share them as social science research. It is enough that we know them.” (page 234)

Contextualizing Openness: situating open science

Leslie Chan, Angela Okune, Rebecca Hillyer, Denisse Albornoz, Alejandro Posada (eds)(2019) Contextualizing Openness: situating open science, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. PDF

The book brings together collective learnings from the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network (OCSDNet)that engaged in a participatory consultation with scientists, development practitioners, and activists from twenty-six countries in the Global South. The book was an eye-opener in our research because it addresses the fiction of openness as a universal good:

“Whose science is being open? By whom? Who is going to benefit from these new framings and practices? What are the risks? Will this lead to equality and equity of knowledge access and production by researchers in unequal settings? Will Open Science disrupt the existing global power structure of knowledge legitimation? Will it lead to further marginalization of knowledge from the Global South? How will Open Science contribute toward the Sustainable Development Goals?” (page 5)

The Transparency Thesis

Ferreira da Silva, Denise (2007) “The Transparency Thesis.” In Toward a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

The first chapter of Ferreira Da Silva's book helped to understand the modern construction of the author as a free, self-determined, individual subject that is entitled to follow its intention, to construct itself as affecting others rather than being affected by others. It helped us to articulate the need to make a shift from intention to relation, which is at the basis of feminist and decolonial methodologies in the arts and abandons the modernist concept of the artist as a self-determined subject.

Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups

Nguyen, Thi C. & Strohl, Matthew (2019) ‘Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups’. Philosophical Studies 176, no. 4 (1 April 2019): 981–1002.

Nguyen and Strohl's text was very helpful since it articulates the binary thinking of “universal entitlement” (you can appropriate freely from other cultures) on one side, and “universal restrictiveness” (cultural appropriation from marginalized groups is impermissible) on the other. In an email to the editors sent in April 2024, he writes:

In thinking about cultural appropriation, what I came to think was that it was bad that one of the key problems was thinking in blanket terms: that cultural appropriation was always problematic or always OK. Instead, what Matt Strohl and I came to think was that some practices had particularly powerful meanings to particular groups. They were intimate practices, practices of group solidarity, that expressed something important about belonging to a group identity.

Setting Conditions for Re-Use

Mugrefya, Élodie & Snelting, Femke (2022) “Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use.” MARCH International.

This article situates the motivations, methodologies, and context that led to the creation of "Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4R)".

The most important move CC4r makes is to invite users to take responsibility for (re-)use. “The CC4r favors re-use and generous access conditions. It considers hands-on circulation as a necessary and generative activation of current, historical and future authored materials. While you are free to (re-)use them, you are not free from taking the implications from (re-)use into account.” This call for careful attention from potential re-users is a way CC4r wants to stay with the potential of Free Culture, but without the universal reliance on freedom bound by law.

Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse

Snelting, Femke & Weinmayr, Eva (2024) “Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse”. In “Publishing After Progress” edited by Rebekka Kiesewetter, culture machine journal of culture and theory vol. 23.

We include this article in this section, because it provides an indepth discussion of CC4r and maps a series of proposals for making conditions for reuse explicit. It discusses a range of experimental Open Content Licences, which attempt to regulate reuse through setting conditions, next to a range of manifestos, guiding principles, and protocols developed mostly in the context of Indigenous knowledge practices. Since these documents articulate values and agreements they can function as toolkits to experiment with more equitable approaches to knowledge sharing.