Conversation with Gabriela Méndez Cota

Gabriela Aiseesoft_Audio_23-06-05 Tue, Jun 06, 2023 4:00PM • 1:08:51 SUMMARY KEYWORDS licence, rewriting, people, book, text, practices, project, context, experiment, university, writing, academia, write, thinking, mexico, open, terms, interesting, chernobyl, annotations SPEAKERS Gabriela, Eva Weinmayr, Femke

Gabriela 00:00 Good to see you too. Oh, good, good. Um, I'm at work, as you can see. There are no classes at the moment. But, you know, VC supervision, extraordinary meetings, things just keep popping up. So, so sorry, I had to cancel last week because I had to give this talk and all everything I explained to you. But anyway, 15 minutes late, but here I am so pleased. Yes.

Eva Weinmayr 00:41 Are you in between things? Or how, like, do you have an hour? Or what sort of

Gabriela 00:46 I have an hour? I have an hour? Yeah, no problem.

Eva Weinmayr 00:49 Yeah, great. So, okay, if I start recording?

Gabriela 00:55 Yeah, that's fine. Okay, great. I mean, I don't know, I don't know what you will ask me.

Femke 01:02 For our own notes, it's not.

Eva Weinmayr 01:10 Yeah. Okay. Thank you. So maybe I should very brief recapitulation, we, we have been working on this licence text on this collective conditions for quite a while coming back and look, looking at it again, and again. And now with this project, they are in there again. And so this is our aim, really to get to get a better idea of how whether a document like this can work or whether it's, this is not the right thing, but also to understand the complexity of these practices and how we can really develop practices that are okay. Like, from whichever perspective that's the thing. So it's a quite a practical work we are doing and we were like, super interested also in your rewriting practices, like you've been working quite concretely on a project with a company. And you chose so as I understood, you chose a book. And then you invited a bunch of people to rewrite it, would you like to tell us a bit about the project and how you dealt with possible friction and tensions, intentions in terms of in terms of authorship and ownership,

Gabriela 02:52 right, yeah. Okay. So, I will repeat part of what I said in the keynote talk at commentary. So, this rewriting project is part of COPIM, an experimental section of that very large project that has the aim, as I understood it, of finding out why people seem to shy away from using all the possibilities that CC BY licences offer, you know, in terms of creating new content on the basis of already published material, including using the language to remix or create derivative work, basically rewrite in that sense. So my understanding is that this experimental section of COPIM was in terms of research, you know, trying to understand how rewriting works when there are no directives, you know, like, you can do this, you cannot do that, et cetera, et cetera. But just see what happens, of course, using a book that is part of a collection that shares the most permissive licence. And, of course, we chose this particular book because it has connections with some of my own work, dealing with agriculture and environmental issues in Mexico. So I was interested in extending a reflection that had been going on in my my own work for a number of years. And the people I chose to work with are people who were familiar with this tragic story and shared my interest in developing environmental reflection through experimental writing of philosophical books, right. So, you know, Marder and Tondeur's book was, like ideal for these. And it's also a book that has already been received and detected as relevant in the Mexican context. In fact, during our rewriting exercise, people in the southern state of Oaxaca translated the book for their own purposes, but that was just a translation. It was not a rewriting of the book. So anyway, the people I worked with, are all women. So I mean, I'm not essentialist or anything, but I also had this interest in you know, like exploring dynamics of group rewriting, that could be eventually thematized or characterised as feminist, but in a different register, you know, like, on the basis of our experience, rather than some, you know, prefabricated discourse, or feminism or anything. So, the experience how it was, it was during the pandemic, so basically, we worked at a distance on we, I mean, we met, I don't know, like, 20 times, like many, many times, twice a month for one year, but then we kept on meeting for another half year, but more sporadically, the most intense part of the work was at the beginning, I suppose, because we were all you know, in shock, and we needed to be in communication, just to, you know, to cope with, you know, with the situation that was just extraordinary. And we basically, first, of course, we read the book, and, and we did this annotations, I mentioned in the keynote using hypotheses, and we discussed a lot about what to do with these annotations, what made annotations useful for you know, like another stage of the process, we spend a lot, a lot of time doing that, you know, like, Okay, what what is a useful annotation, and basically, what we came up with was okay, so, basically, there is something associative about reading and writing in general, you know, so, people who annotate some content, do that, because they associate something in the text with something else. And we agreed to try to associate basically, with two things, in response to this particular book. (1) Our own memories of, you know, what was happening in the 80s in Mexico. For example, what how was the Chernobyl event recorded in Mexican media or in our own family lives, what we know or not know about radioactive disasters here in Mexico or in the world. So we decided to, you know, like narrow, or orient our annotations in that direction, like try to recall and in the other, and on the other hand, not just personal memories, but also, you know, our work, like what each of us has been doing in terms of, you know, philosophical writing, philosophical research, not all of the rewriters were doing disciplinary philosophy, just one part of them. The others were more in SDS or there is one psychoanalyst. But anyway, like, we also wanted to associate with the other readings, we have been doing intellectual pursuits, we all have each of us, not necessarily linked to Chernobyl, but linked to the kind of, you know, philosophical problematic, that Marder also participates in, and articulates in his own way to propose this vegetal thinking. Right? So, you know, we wanted to kind of formulate also the ethical and the political problem of Chernobyl for us here. Invoking references from, you know, like, the tradition, or the traditions, if you want, you know, some, some, some of the rewriters are very decolonial. So, you know, they invoke decolonial references, but it wasn't, you know, like anything obligatory, or any any of that, I mean, I have a big problem with the decolonial thing. Because it's, you know, kind of academic discourse from my, from my point of view, and it's also become a sort of moral code and like, like, a sort of, you know, short, it kind of, how do you say that at that home? You know, like, it's, it's, I don't remember how you say that, but it's like, a short way to be right, you know, like, the quick way to be right, without, you know, asking questions or, you know, posing problems and doing reflection. I mean, that's, that's like a phenomenon we've, we are immersed in at the moment and know how long will last? But I mean, that's, that's, that's one thing I emphasise, because when we titled, our experiments, situated engagements with the Chernobyl herbarium we are I wasn't meaning decolonial, right. Because one way of understanding, situated thinking in Latin America is to automatically attach it to the label decolonial. And this is, this is not that, you know, it's, it's, it's more about work with singularity, and subjectivity. And, you know, how can we, I mean, now I'm, I'm kind of changing the topic to our understanding of group work, not in terms of breakeven or reconstituted community, but as a work of community, but in a different sense, precisely not in the Identitarian communitarian sense, associated with decolonial discourse, like we are all decolonial here, or we are all Mexican in the same way or, you know, we men in the same way, not nothing of the kind. So, you know, like, our, you know, experiment with community was okay. I mean, it's the work of rewriting and realising that language doesn't belong to anyone in particular, right. But we all depend on language to have to establish relationships with each other and with ourselves. So, I mean, I think this what I'm saying now sounds a bit abstract. It's something that was, you know, put into practice, in each of the pieces of writing that were produced. And I don't know if you have seen the, because it's published now. It hasn't been launched. Let me just find it. If you don't

Eva Weinmayr 13:22 check the website today. It wasn't not it wasn't online was saying,

Gabriela 13:28 hey, maybe. So I can see it now. So

Eva Weinmayr 13:36 can you maybe just,

Gabriela 13:40 yeah, in two minutes. And you can I mean, you have to go down and you can maybe it's not clear. Can I share the screen with you? Okay, so where is the screen sharing? With you, I mean, you have, you can see the title, and then a short description. And then if you go down, you can see something that says reuse rewrite is appropriate. And if you click there, you should go to the, like, the integrated book, because it's it's, it's there are two versions of that book. There are two versions. And this is the one that articulates fragments from all the essays that were produced individually in response to the original Chernobyl herbarium. So basically, this starts with the preface which is also fragmentary, and With fragments from different authors, that kind of, you know, the sequence of fragments kind of resonates with the sequence in the original book. But the fragments belong to different people and just resonate together to you know, give them if not a coherent effect, at least, you know, like, like a more integrated effect. And this is the this will be printed at some point, you know. And we will launch it and all that. But anyway, so, I mean, I would say that this rewriting experience can be summarised maybe by the term improvisation. And also, I mean, I can I can maybe talk about, oh, no,

Eva Weinmayr 16:01 maybe I'm just I have kind of two questions. So one will be about the community, but, but maybe just for clarification with the book in the rewriting practices. So, you said, some had some sort of feminist approaches or approaches, which were not prescribed. That sounds really interesting. But the sort of, I think, for me, it's important to understand so the framework of this work really was that there was an open licence, sec, a Creative Commons licence, so you were actually allowed to do anything with the text. So beyond this sort of green cart of doing anything with the text, were there any moments where you had? When things got a bit complicated or entangled? Or in terms of Did you always feel comfortable with what was happening?

Gabriela 17:19 You mean, I mean, you're interested specifically in questions of ownership and things like that, right.

Femke 17:29 But also in the way that such a licence creates, or doesn't create the conditions for the rewriting itself, so how it functions in the process, and whether it's, it steers it or constrains it or if it actually

Gabriela 17:50 makes you mean, the licence Okay? Well, the licence only demands are only requires attribution of the original work. And none of us had any problem, you know, in fact, maybe it was more difficult to convince or persuade my, my fellow rewriters to, you know, write freely, using, you know, text, because the first impulse was, of course, to, you know, to write as you were taught to write at school, and at least here in Mexico, writing, education has its characteristics. I mean, you, you are not allowed to say, I asked, you know, people do in English, it seemed like, you know, that's very pretentious, you don't write using it, because immediately, your reader will suspect that, you know, you are being I don't know, dogmatic or you know, and in English in Magna academic context, they encourage you to use the right because that's the only way they can believe you are taking charge of an argument you are there to argue to defend something that belongs to you, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, that's a cultural difference that for me is very significant. So our writing styles in Mexican academia is one just minimise, you know, the individual voice and write in a way that proves that you know, the Canon, you know, of the discipline, in this case, philosophy, and you have to be, you know, like paying respects To the canon, constantly naming the canon, so the first impulse of many of my rewriters was to do a sort of commentary of, you know, martyrs text, when they started writing their individual pieces on the basis of the annotations, so I worked a lot with them, to try to reorient that kind of writing more in the, in the direction of a reuse of murderers style of writing, not so much, you know, his argument, or his memories, or the things that he put in those fragments, it was more in the sense of, you know, we can also write in a way, in a poetic way, in a way that combines, you know, autobiographical or autofiction autobiography, with some sort of argument, you know, but the idea of an argument, I think it should be taken, you know, like, what's this? So, I think, for me, that was the most difficult, and also interesting aspect of the whole exercise. Rewriting can mean also, you know, like, on learning certain writing styles that have been constraining you, and creating new writing styles, on the basis of content that proposes has a stylistic proposal. So for us, this book was not, you know, some, you know, material that belongs to somebody else, and I'm going to go there and take some of that material for myself or for ourselves. Now, it's not that it's just, you know, we don't have that kind of conception of the text anyway. You know, so the licence, you know, you can do with this derivative work, I mean, cool, you know, we can do that, but we are not, you know, talking with the licence, we are talking, you know, it's like, because the problem from the beginning for coping at least, and perhaps also, for me, though, in a different sense, was that, you know, you have all these possibilities, but, you know, it's not that spontaneous, it's not that automatic, that people will use those possibilities, unless, of course, they are already, you know, artists working with text, you know, because there's, of course, history of that, and the tradition of that. And at the beginning, it was a suggestion, it wasn't a directive. We were provided with examples of, you know, artists who intervene books, and, you know, highlight omissions or problems there, and, you know, do a protest with what somebody says in a book. And that's, you know, like, critical impetus that we do not despise, but we didn't want to do that, because, you know, it's already been done many times. And perhaps, I mean, I was, you know, in search of something different, that has to do with my own trajectory, and my own immediate context, you know, I mean, I'm, I mean, as part of my daily work, I have to teach people to read and write I mean, that's what I do.

Eva Weinmayr 23:56 Gonna ask you, you just said that, you you guys have a very different relationship to text. So the question of licence is not is not relevant. Is that is that a relationship whatever to pick up from Christina Rivera Carson when she writes about that, like any text is collected from from its very start or from its very beginning and I mean, I'm would that am I right to say that our brains are so infiltrated by neoliberal and copyright intellectual property, discourse that it's just really hard to overcome that. How could you speak a bit about this relationship to texts and collectivity and ownership in your in your cultural background, because maybe it is difference.

Gabriela 25:03 Yeah, I mean, I think we have to specify the contexts in which, because even here in Mexico, like, at the moment, I am in a university, and this university has its, you know, its policies, and it's, you know, stock of intellectual property. And, you know, well, that's closer to the juridical common sense, you know, like, you know, academic products or finished products and belong to someone, in some, you know, in some sense, maybe morally to the authors, but you know, we're talking about copyright, well, then it belongs to the university. So, you know, is it in the whole world. And it hasn't, I mean, I had this project about it ended one year ago, and this, this rewriting was part of that project I had within my university, which was called philosophy of editorial practice critical perspectives on open access. So it was very weird, because in a philosophy department, nobody talks about editorial practices, or open access here in Mexico. So I had this very weird project, that was interesting, because not just because of that, but also because it connected me with other areas of the university outside my own department, including the research office, which at the moment was led and still lead, but you know, things just, you know, have their cycles, maybe that will end soon, you know, by very critical social science, people who continue to be interested in creating an open access policy for the university, or at least a position, you know, of the University with regard to open access as a public issue, as a public issue. This is a private university, so it has ended it is also addressed with university. So it has, you know, it's contradictory logics, because as a private university, it is, of course, interested more in protecting, generating and protecting intellectual property, and taking open access only, insofar as it, you know, is compatible with intellectual property discourse, and subordinated to, you know, this common sense of, you know, and, and on the other hand, they suggest with university, so it has this mission, you know, to save the world, and then, you know, public publicly oriented, open access, discourse and practice is, like, more consistent with the religious mission of the university. So, taking that, as, you know, my institutional context, what I did with my project was, you know, draw attention of, you know, like, higher level people to that contradiction on the one hand, and, you know, the many possibilities of working with open access in, in in a pedagogic set setting, you know, like trying not to see open access only in terms of, you know, is it compatible or not with intellectual property? Because that's, you know, like, the immediate reaction, you get, you know, and that's like, the very limited constraining, you know, framework of interpreting open access, you know, is it compatible with property or not? And it's, yeah, it's like that economic interpretation of open access, whereas there are other interpretations of open access, like radical open access, which has to do with transformation of knowledge, etc. So, what I tried to do was to, you know, to put that I mean, I succeeded for some moments, you know, it's difficult to change, of course, institutional structures, not to mention, as you were saying, you know, epistemic frameworks and cultural frameworks, you're not going to change you know, like the economic kind of thinking from one day to the next, but at least you know, in a very naughty way, you you place the contradictions on the table and you know, you create suddenly some spaces for discussing things that otherwise would be you know, completely away from from you know, like conscious discussion of The University. And it's

Eva Weinmayr 30:01 really great that you sort of intervened into this sort of institutional thinking and institutional infrastructures. But I think my question was maybe more geared towards outside academia, like what is the understanding of if when you have of the conditions of the text when you read a text, so yeah, outside of academia,

Gabriela 30:29 this is a additional context, right? Then there are the social movements, I mean, my, my acquaintance with, you know, like the, I mean, I don't know if I could call them hackers, but they're hackerspaces, in Mexico City and throughout Latin America. And some of my collaborators in this project I just mentioned, came from something that was called in Rancho electronic. And that was a hackerspace, in Mexico City, that at the moment, I think it's kind of in standby, but it was a very important space hackerspace for, I think, a decade or so. And, I mean, we kind of wrote about it a little bit, I think in a critical art space. But I mean, this is outside academia, but in my reading of it, it, I wouldn't say that it is completely outside of academia, you know, because even if it's like an autonomous space people, young people just organise themselves to have this space and sustain it themselves for a while and experimented with you know, commune like existence. You know, they created they developed models of several fronts, you know, of cooperating, and those like a cultural space, autonomous self self managed cultural space. I mean, yeah, but most of the people who arrived there and sustain this space are not themselves, completely outside academia, they have, you know, some sort of professional training, and a job, you know, sometimes in academia, so, so I'm more interested in the kind of feedback between activism, academia, self managed spaces, sometimes with a very strong anti institutional discourse, as in the hackerspaces. That's definitely the case. But there is a feedback with academia, which can also be very anti institutional, especially in the critical humanities, you know, so, this has been my focus in terms of because in this particular hackerspace, what they did for a while, among many other things, was to digitise books, they constructed their own scanner, and they devoted years to digitise page by page, you know, several books, and they have reading groups where they read the, you know, the books, and they, you know, as part of their cultural programming. There were lots of experimental writing activities, and I think that Christina Rivera Garza at some point worked with people from a ranch electronica for a number of editorial projects. And there are links also between ranch electronical and people from what Hakka you know, this southern states who she has worked with also, people from, you know, writing, yeah, writers, young writers she has worked with, and I think she, she kind of developed her, you know, this appropriation thing throughout these years, including that conversation with local young writers and spaces such as El Rancho electronica. So, the thing is complex, because you can say, you know, that is outside academia, yes. But, you know, depends on how you look at it, you know, because it's academic people doing things outside academia and then bringing them back, you know, and also, like putting them in the culture industry, you know, Random House, one gallery, the, you know, Christina Rivera, Garcia's publisher. It's like mainstream commercial publisher, you know, so these rewriting stuff is published in you know, like a very commercial publisher. On fact, And, but Jesus thinks this. Now, also, I tried to make emphases on these in the keynote. I mean, this idea she has is a very philosophical idea that has, you know, years of existence, you know, this idea of this appropriation. I mean, it's not something that she invented out of the blue, discussing with people in branch. No, I mean, that that has a genealogy, you know, that has a philosophical genealogy and a literary genealogy. So it's nothing really new to say that, you know, texts don't have, you know, authors or, you know, owners. In the last instance, you know, like, this is just some cultural juridical, economic thing that has been imposed on text in general. But, you know, people have disagreed with that ever since copyright was invented. And they have, you know, like, kind of sanitised that throughout the 20th century, poststructuralism bar, you know, like, you know, it's, it's nothing, you know, like, very mysterious, it's just as you were saying, our institutional settings, and where we are trained and educated. I mean, they just force us to relate to texts, as you know, like, finished works that belong somebody with an owner, and we're just you know, subordinated to the wisdom that text is also very religious thing. I mean, economy is a religious thing. So if I, if I, if I replied in a more pertinent way, just let me know.

Femke 36:50 I'm wondering when you when I hear you describe the the circulations between academia and inside outside of it. Like when we try to think about a practice of reuse that works, or that is okay, as, as Adrian said, of course, we're trying to look for kind of practice that can function in those environments, that are deeply touched by the economic and by the academic. So also have carried some of the habits and expectations outside inside. And because we can say that text is not is is always already collective. But in practice, when we, when we touch a text, we are very much aware that that I mean, I think there were a description of how it was difficult to start moving with the text, even when explicitly the Permission was given to do so is not very much trained in a disciplined in going with that juridical economic framework. So for me, free licences have always been, in a way manifestos that help to remember this, this aspect of cultural production. And I'm just wondering, like, if the licence didn't do the job, where where is it, then how do we how do we practice with this contradiction? On the one hand, knowing very well, anyone you ask knows very well, that text is not. There's no tabula rasa, but our practices, like the way that we are taught and the way that we function with knowledge is disciplining us to actually act. And to me, licences are somehow a kind of, I don't know, like a tool in that tension. But maybe, I don't know. I'm wondering what do you think?

Gabriela 39:12 No, I think yeah, there's something I I mean, the politics of licences I suppose, you are most concerned about and there is something I would like to add about you know, reverses thing which you have already pointed to, in previous conversations, you know, like, how do you negotiate or agree with other people what you can do up to what point with what text and I mean, I think there is something in common between what she says about comunidad, which is something you know, that has been theorised by members of the media community and indigenous community in the state of Wahaca, Blue River to the US and other people primaluna They kind of, you know, theorise, practices of reciprocity and responsibility that characterise you know, the ways of life of that particular community. And that's what they called communally that. So one of those practices of reciprocity and responsibility, I would say, if we, if we put it in the context of writing and rewriting would be to, to give credit, to, you know, to be to care about, you know, equality and justice and all of that. So this is something that communally that as as these people theorise it, and, for example, radical open access with all these ideas of, you know, we have to, it's not about just, you know, making something accessible, it's about, you know, questioning what access means, and, you know, what the problems, the actual problems of knowledge creation and sharing, entail in terms of, you know, making sure that, you know, different people have the possibility of contributing, creating, etc. So, so this is a shared concern, I think, between Canada and radical open access. And so the problems that we face, in each rewriting experiment have to do precisely with that, you know, it's not just that the licence requires from us that we say, Yeah, this was originally written by murder, and, you know, images belong to Thunder, you know, they are the true owners of these work, and we're just making some derivative stuff, you know, this, but it's by them originally, it's not just that it's that, you know, among ourselves throughout these experiments, we were working, you know, we were working, not just us, but with other people who are supporting us. You know, we we've had to make a number of decisions, like, how is credit going to be distributed here, you know, like, what is the role of the editor, in this case, me, you know, how are we going to be credited as individual authors, are we going to be credited as a group, but then we did different things in very different, you know, and the specificity of a contribution should also be credited in its specificity. And, like, how do we do this, you know, or should we, for example, you know, just just renounce, you know, individual credit, and maybe publish? Oh, something that everything is out, you're still there, right?

Eva Weinmayr 43:25 We can hear you, but I can, okay, yes. Oh, here you are. Okay.

Gabriela 43:31 So, so this was, of course, like, an interesting part, it wasn't conflictive really, you know, because we were, you know, this was a very controlled experiment, I had it very controlled. I mean, I invited people, and I made sure that there was, you know, like, or made an effort, you know, to just be very explicit about the, also the problematic dimensions and, you know, my, my team was very aware of of, like, the kind of thing that the whole experiment was being critical of, so, and, you know, nobody was doing this because, you know, they would get some kind of benefit in the short term. Everybody knew it was an experiment, and you know, so there was a lot of free labour from everybody's part. And they just, you know, did it how do you say that goodwill, good faith, etc. But of course, this is a very controlled experiment, but normally in for example, projects with your colleagues at uni or to know family projects, I mean, any other project of course, they is going to cause a lot of conflict boasts that a licence, you know, for reuse could be helpful in certain contexts, you know? And perhaps that's what you would have to want to define, you know, what kind of problem this licence you're trying to create would solve, and what is the context in which such a problem appears or get four gets formed? You know, like, for example, in Wahaca, and the communities who do take you or communally that, you know, this exchange of gifts, and, you know, I mean, they know, it's, it's a very definite context. And, you know, people are, are bound by shared values, and, you know, they have these, also the sense of belongingness, that has to do with the threat the the face every day, you know, of invasion, violence, state violence, all that. So communally that works there. Because, you know, there is already kind of, you know, maybe it's part of the self protection of some people against some external threat. And you can find an instance of that here. You know, nowadays, humanities are under attack, so we need to pull together, or they're going to, you know, kill us. And I don't know, I mean, it really depends on the context. But I wanted to add this about Carmela and how it translates into writing and rewriting context. So it's the issue of credit. And in my own project, it appeared also, at the point of, I assuming a role of editor, not just editor in the sense of, you know, I like this idea. And now I gather some, you know, essays, no, I was editor in a very strong sense of actually writing with my team, you know, writing and rewriting their pieces, and then fragmenting their pieces and putting them together in the way I decided. So that was an exercise of power, of course, you know, but, you know, if you make, if you say, Yes, I'm doing this, you know, because I am the editor, and you have agreed to participate with me in these experiments, you know, and they, so, it was interesting, because normally, also in an academic context, you have to be very careful with how you deal with the texts of other people. And in this experimental context, since we agreed that we would be rewriting everything, you know, people were, like, much more open to being rewritten. Right. And in the end, only them appear as authors, I only appears editor. No. So that was a kind of transaction. You know, and we talked a lot about this, you know, because, I don't know, I suppose, I suppose the key to the thing is that people don't do it, because of in pursuit of an individual benefit. I think that's the key to the success of this particular experiment. And I don't know how this could be integrated into any licence because it really belongs to the singularity of each project.

Femke 49:06 Yeah, I mean, that's, that's, that's one of the urgencies we feel obviously is like the blanket effective of most licences, not at all being able to deal with context is a bit freaky. Yeah, but I wanted to like maybe if I was to go to this code that you picked from ceiling scars Juwanna ceilings cast text, because we try to follow you there because of like in different encounters we have, it came up and actually also today you when you refer to, for example, decolonial practice like it's too prescribed. So this and this is of course, an issue with, with licence like it's, it's contractual, it's like pre determining, and therefore, maybe it is not at all a kind of tool that is working. So just to list that to be, and that's what was actually the question we tried to write you is like, what, what is the issue with the pre defined or the or the policy? Like, you've been speaking against policy in one of the sessions or? And so if I'm sorry, I

Eva Weinmayr 50:36 don't seem to find the chat anymore. It's somehow disappeared. I could put in the quote, how comes maybe just

Femke 50:46 do this? Maybe you see it? Because of the pier again,

Eva Weinmayr 50:52 no, what is the plus when I put actions start to pull random user layout settings?

Femke 50:58 If you if the public chat, like there's a little person in on the top?

Eva Weinmayr 51:05 Oh, on the top,

Femke 51:07 and then you can do public chat. And now you succeed,

Eva Weinmayr 51:12 you are already copied in when you were struggling? Okay. Okay, good. Maybe?

Femke 51:27 No, no, no, no. No. You wouldn't ever write something like this. We're interested in this content based obligation telling us in advanced,

Gabriela 51:44 what's that? Is that a quote from cylindrica?

Eva Weinmayr 51:47 Yes, it's in the form of the view ethics,

Gabriela 51:51 ethics. On your media age, okay.

Femke 51:56 Check or anything? We were really interested in this.

Gabriela 52:02 I mean, my way of saying the same thing would be, you know, non normative forms of ethics. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's a thing, but what's the question like, what's does it trouble you or what's the right, in that way, but I agree with the idea there. You know, I think that's the

Femke 52:27 but we so what is the problem? I mean, when we tried to work with licences as a tool or conditions as, as, as, as a way to somehow make the politics of reuse emerge, that is always a content based obligation telling us in advance what we should and should not do. That's what those those texts do. So we wanted to speak with you about the maybe the inherent issue with trying to work with something like a licence or conditions or a code.

Gabriela 53:13 Yeah. I don't work with licences. I don't do licences. Right. So I know, that's your project, but

Eva Weinmayr 53:21 I would be happy not to use the term licence. But to use the term agreement or? Yeah, I think agreement might be quite good. And sort of to complicate the discussion I, I'm thinking of Joe Freeman's text, the tyranny of structure lessness. I don't know Gabriella, whether you you don't have it, but she makes she makes basically the point that it's written in the 70s. So it's sort of women liberation in the States. And she's making the point that women's liberation wanted always it was seeking actively informality. So, not Yeah, and then free men observes what happens with informality and understands that always the most powerful women exchange information and and this information never reaches the base so that there is the idea of a flat structure, but without clear structures, agreements and rules people adhere to an equal society can never be reached. So this is a very short thing maybe fam, can you you can contextualise this better. I'm just so there is a strong feminist urge to negotiate make agreements adhere to the agreements in order to also be accountable somehow. And and this sort of clashes with this idea of, I'm just looking at the quote, again, retain a sense of ethical responsibility. I mean, if we leave it to each individual to retain a sense of ethical responsibility Yeah, I think this is maybe I'm thinking to binary, I guess I'm thinking to binary. But, but still, there's a clear sort of fridge. Because it's telling us in advance, or how you would say, the sort of the policies, we don't need policies, more policies, we need practices, and I totally, I totally buy that we need practices, we need to experiment and we need to figure it out and learn by doing this.

Gabriela 56:32 Have you worked with the idea of goodwill or good faith. “Buena fe”, it translates literally from Spanish to “good will” or “good faith” in English. It's a juridical term here [in Mexico] to act in goodwill, it has some weight. If there is no goodwill, then there are consequences. If you can prove that somebody did not act in good faith or goodwill. And that's where, you know, a sense of ethical responsibility. It's not just an individual thing, you know, because it has to do with our relation to others. I don't know if that's, that's included in your project of a licence. But it comes to my mind as something that could work within a non normative or non content based framework. Now, you were saying, Yeah, man, it's not that either about the binary thinking and all that. It's not that, you know, there, we don't need any sort of, you know, framework for agreements, right. My point, my, my opinion, because I don't work with licences. I'm not doing research on that, and I'm not interested in doing a licence. But in my opinion, as a sub practitioner, you know, as someone who has worked in this particular experiment with the radical open access community, in my opinion, we don't need more licences. And, you know, I mean, you said, we need to understand, and maybe articulate in a more explicit way, as feminism has been doing, of course, for decades, you know, you know, the power dynamics that escape any licence, and that have to do with what we do with licences, and how we do it, with people with other people. And I think it's, you know, it's like the problem of the law in general, you know, I mean, the law is not the same as justice and we have to keep, you know, interrogating the law, from you know, from its margins from its limits, etc. You know, so that's my general problem with licences, that, you know, if you think you have achieved a licence that will prevent any violence or all violence, well, then you will have reached a point at which you render the law and justice equivalent. And for me, that's injustice. That's unethical. You know, that's my problem with not not with these licence, but with juridical thinking in general. Okay. So, so it would be interesting to produce a quasy licence, not a licence, but something like a quasy licence, including, you know, a concept of, of goodwill or good faith. That, you know, it's that that has like prescriptions that, you know, could be relevant in, at the time of negotiating the meaning of the licence in particular settings.

Femke 1:00:37 That's super helpful. I think actually, that's, that's in a in a rudimentary way, in our first rewriting of something that is actually not really a licence anymore. Quasi we didn't use this system, very much doing is indeed this. Bringing the question, I mean, we don't call it good place, because also of its connotations, and it's I mean, that's then the critique of Joe Freeman is like, all women of good faith that do not make explicit what agreements they operate upon, actually produce class differences and make it impossible for anyone outside of that. She uses even the word click to, like, have access to power. So in good faith is somehow a bit something to look into. If that's

Gabriela 1:01:47 just working on, you know, like a general idea, but something that could also be interesting is to, instead of a set of, you know, obligations that could be generalised or applied anywhere. Maybe like a set of injunctions to draw agreements in particular contexts, you know, would be and not, I don't know.

Eva Weinmayr 1:02:16 Gabriella, what was the Word, the Spanish, that Mexican word for good faith, just for us to refer to?

Gabriela 1:02:25 When I say, the when

Eva Weinmayr 1:02:28 would you type it in?

Gabriela 1:02:33 To act in good faith would be a cloud, they're gonna fail. And it's a habit here, because before coming to speak with you, I was in a meeting with lawyers. Because, you know, as an academic community in a private university, we are now how do you say that in English? Like, I mean, we are in a legal disputes with Mexico's governments, they are changing all the science policy, and they want to exclude private universities from, you know, some aspects of science policy, including, you know, like, economic stimulus for individual researchers. So we've been going through these for years now. And my university, which is, in fact, very well positioned university in the country, has, you know, very good lawyers, and they have been, you know, leading all these legal disputes with Mexico's government. And I was in a meeting with them. And they were, you know, like saying all these things in juridical language and they say, now you have to sign these, which says, in good faith, because so I'm just repeating what I heard. Okay.

Femke 1:04:00 Well, it's interesting that in a Jesuit complex faith is the, it becomes legal. I mean, that's what you actually know. But it's not

Gabriela 1:04:07 just with language. It's, you know, it's like drinkin language in general. I mean, this is, you know, like, conflict with the state. And these are lawyers, you know, with the vocabulary so I was like, yeah, for me, of course, in good faith would have an ethical meaning for them. It has a juridical meaning. But anyway, I think, you know, these can all always be, you know, researched, what does it mean? And, you know, what's the, what's the function of this idea of good faith in juridical discourse? Maybe could open the door to something. That's just my improvised hypothesis now. Very welcome. Okay, so I hope I hope this was useful to you And

Femke 1:05:01 yes, absolutely,

Eva Weinmayr 1:05:02 absolutely. Thanks a lot.

Gabriela 1:05:06 He knows about, you know, what you what you end up doing with the licence, I will be very interesting for me to know. And of course, if you want to perform any experiments, you know, with the licence, let me know when. Yeah. And we'd be interested

Eva Weinmayr 1:05:23 to keep you on the mailing list for the reading group. So maybe if you find Yes, it would be nice to Yeah, hopefully. I

Gabriela 1:05:30 mean, if you do anything in the in the over the summer, it's more likely that I will be able to take part because during the during term time, I have classes. It's complicated to do that on the week. But thank you very much for keeping any.

Eva Weinmayr 1:05:49 Did you have a chance to look at the draft of the abstract? Yeah,

Gabriela 1:05:54 I mean, in terms of an a proposal of an argument, I mean, of course, it fits, and it's, it's great. I like it, maybe just give them a bit more indication of what the cases you will be describing? Bar? That would be, you know, useful. Interesting, you know, and if you need any, any sort of feedback, you know, during the preparation of the article, I can also read anything you want me to read? Right? Yeah. In terms of argument, of course, it's really cool. Now, this is a journal, I have to say, I mean, to me, it's cool. Because, you know, I know, the kind of, you know, essay style. But this journal is as it's more biassed towards social science, you know, so it's a humanities journal. But in fact, if you look at things they publish, it's very much in the tradition of social science media studies, rather than humanities Media Studies. And I think you are more humanities than social science. Am I right? Or am I wrong? Because you weren't with art, and things like that. Right? Yeah, yeah. More art Diem. So that's why I think it would be good to know what the cases are, you know, because that's what I mean. So that's it.

Femke 1:07:32 Yeah. And so we extend the abstract with the cases.

Gabriela 1:07:38 Just specify it doesn't have to be very long, just just, you know, bit more information about that. And doesn't have to be more than, I don't know, three lines or? Yeah. But don't worry. I mean, thank you very much. Thank you very much for you know, like writing an abstract and being interested in contributing to the issue. And as I said, I mean, of course, I had to insist because you're doing this licence, like it's directly related to the to the

Femke 1:08:10 scope was really fantastic proposal, and it's comes at a good moment for us. So it will be very useful.

Eva Weinmayr 1:08:19 opportunity to sort of bounce back and forth ideas. So to be in dialogue with you. It's fabulous to have them. Yeah, yeah.

Gabriela 1:08:28 That's great. I'm very excited about that, too.

Femke 1:08:31 Okay. Nice. Well,

Gabriela 1:08:35 so we'll keep in touch then. Yes.

Eva Weinmayr 1:08:37 Thanks. Have a good day.

Gabriela 1:08:43 Take care. We look everything. Bye bye. Bye bye.