Reading Group, Limits to Openness
Reading Group, Limits to Openness (May 2023 - Dec 2023)
Hello,
We are getting in touch to see, whether you would be interested to join a newly formed reading group to explore the “Limits to Openness”. “We” is Femke Snelting and Eva Weinmayr –– working on a 2-year project “Ecologies of Dissemination, decolonial knowledge practice, feminist methodology, open access”. From a commitment to sharing and re-use – beyond conventional copyright – we are trying to come to terms with issues of universalism related to the idea of “openness”, as often presented in Open Content, Open Access, Free Culture and so forth. Does Free Culture perversely repeat here the colonial gesture of creating a ground zero for the circulation of knowledge as a “Free” object? What could decolonial, feminist conditions for re-use look like, that would acknowledge entangled notions of authorship?
We'd propose to meet once a month, online on Big Blue Button, to read texts, or watch/listen/discuss podcasts or films. You can of course join one or multiple sessions. If this sounds interesting to you, and if you can make some time for this thinking together, please email eva.weinmayratakademinvaland.gu.se to sign up.
You'll find the dates for the meetings paired with suggested readings below. The meetings are set at different times that, we hope, might work across several timezones. Although a few might be quite late or rather early for some regions,
Eva and Femke
Please forward this invitation to those who might be interested to join.
Monday, 18 December 2023 16.00–18.00 (CET)
Dear all,
Welcome to the last session of the Limits to Openness reading group. We decided to propose reading Eve Tuck's and Wayne Yang's article "R-Words: Refusing Research" because the 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, so our challenge in this session would be to translate the cases and claims made in the text to cultural practice (in and outside academia) and to 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)
In the session, we will focus on Axiom II (pages 232-236)
Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang (2014), "R-Words: Refusing Research". In Humanizing research: decolonizing qualitative inquiry with youth and communities, pages 223-248. Download PDF
Tuesday, 21 November 23, 18.00–20.00 (CET)
In the upcoming reading session we will read Abigail de Kosnik's writing about rogue reuse in fan fiction communities. When we meet, we might listen also to some additional audio materials in dialogue with this text.
We would like to use these resources to think together 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), this session attempts to explore where ethical authority could be situated, beyond individual authorship.
De Kosnik, Abigail. “Licensing and Licentiousness.” In Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom, 307–14. The MIT Press, 2016. PDF
Tuesday, 10 October 23, 18.00–20.00 (CEST)
Welcome back to the Limits to Openness Reading Group.
In next week' session we would like to discuss Angela Okune's Self-Review of Citational Practice (2019). It is a short list of questions that she suggests to ask ourselves, before publishing a text or other work.
-> Please try to answer Angela Okune's questions about your citational practice beforehand.Download PDF
We will activate Okune's proposal in dialog with Collective Conditions for Reuse (CC4r), a set of guidelines for (re)using creative practice that a group of people around Constant in Brussels (including Eva and Femke) have been drafting in 2020. We are also preparing for a collective rewrite of this text in 2024.
More context on the pieces:
Angela Okune is co-author of Contextualising Openness PDF and the LSE Blogpost Decolonizing scholarly data and publishing infrastructures (2019)
Mugrefya, Elodie, and Femke Snelting. “Collectively Setting Conditions for Re-Use.” MARCH International, 2022. https://march.international/collectively-setting-conditions-for-re-use/.
Spring Dates
Tuesday, 20 June 23, 20.00-22.00 (CEST)
In the next reading session on Tuesday, June 20 20.00–22.00 (CEST) we will cross read black feminist thinker Katherine McKittrick's (2021) text "Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered About the Floor)" with the text "How deep is your Source" (2013) by media researcher, artist and musician Aymeric Mansoux.
In her text, Katherine McKittrick gives an account of her own lively practices of sourcing and resourcing knowledges and ideas:
By observing how arranging, rearranging, and collecting ideas outside ourselves are processes that make our ideas our own, I think about how our ideas are bound up in stories, research, inquiries, that we do not (or should not claim we) own.
In an attempt to re-invent a practice of citation that is beyond academic signposting, she writes: "I show the images because I want to be as honest as I can about my intellectual history while also recognizing my dishonest memory. I show the images because I want to be honest about where my ideas come from while recognizing that this is also a process of forgetting."
In the second 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.
While written from different perspectives, practices and concerns, we think (hope) that by bringing these texts in conversation with each other, we can find out something about a possible politics of re-use.
On Tuesday, we will read together Mac Kittrick from page 14 to page 19.
With Aymeric's text we will focus on the part Towards the Borges Public License
Katherine McKittrick: “Footnotes, (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)”, in: Dear Science and Other Stories, Duke University Press, 2021. DOI: 10.1215/9781478012573-002. ISBN(s): 978-1-4780-1257-3
PDF
Aymeric Mansoux (2013), How deep is your source? https://archive.bleu255.com/bleu255.com-texts/how-deep-is-your-source/index.html
Wednesday, 24 May 23, 16-18.00 (CEST)
In our next session we will read parts of the last chapter (conclusion) of "The Copyright Thing Doesn't Work Here" (2011) by Boatema Boateng. 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.
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)
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 re-use.
On May 24 we will read together Conclusion in which Boateng makes a connection to the potential and to the problems of Open Content for the Ghanee context. PDF pp 165–170 and 178–182
+ cross-reading + cross listening: Critical Race IP
SoundCloud: UCLA, Season 6, Episode 4: Exploring Critical Race IP. With Dean Deidre Keller and Kimberly Tignor, 2021 Listen to Podcast
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
Monday, 17 April 23, 16.00-18.00 (CEST)
Cristina Rivera Garza (2020). The Restless Dead: Necrowriting and Disappropriation. Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020.
Disapropriation critiques the appropriating other’s voices for its own benefit, but instead: exposes unequal exchange of labor that happens when collective experience is used for individual gain. What disappropriation does, is to restore the plurality of writing.
We are curious how Garza's description of disappropriative practices could help us formulate a politics of re-use. Even if for Garza, disappropriation is based in writerly practice, what would disappropriation mean for other types of creative practice?
- From the introduction, we will read and discuss from last paragraph on page 3 ("Writing against the status quo") until page 7 (first paragraph ending:"of what occurs.") PDF, pp 0-20
- From the chapter on Disappropriation – Writing with and for the Dead: we will read and discuss from page 52 (Disappropriation:A poetics of community) until page 56 (first paragraph, ending with "how the community will produce and reproduce itself") PDF, pp 43-78
Tuesday, 28 March 23, 20.00-22.00 (CEST)
Ken Chen, ‘Authenticity Obsession, or Conceptualism as Minstrel Show’, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, 11 June 2015, https://aaww.org/authenticity-obsession/
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 (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 (PDF, p.10)
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
We ask you to read the text beforehand, and then when we meet, we will read some parts together more closely.
Reading Ideas
Looking at Roberto Esposito's thinking of what forms a community and what are the mutual obligations when you're forming part of a community. We could cross read the way Esposito describes how firstly communities are formed (boundaries and measures of protection of a community: immunity and community) and secondly how they are operating (rules, “munus”, mutual debt (from a Western, white male perspective) with perspectives from a queer, feminist, indigenous perspective.
--> Perhaps cross-read with Floriberto Diaz's "Tequio"
-->Aymeric Mansoux and Roscam Abbing, Seven Theses on the Fediverse and the Becoming of FLOSS. https://monoskop.org/images/c/cc/Mansoux_Aymeric_Abbing_Roel_Roscam_2020_Seven_Theses_on_the_Fediverse_and_the_Becoming_of_FLOSS.pdf
--> Do you have suggestions on queer, feminist, indigenous perspectives on “communities” and how they set conditions for sharing and re-using knowledge? Any suggestions? Please send them through.
More possible readings
Cheryl I. Harris (1993), Whiteness as Property, Harvard Law Review, Volume 106, June 1993, number 8. [PDF: https://cryptpad.fr/file/#/2/file/D5Mk97l9hVKgIerjrXpr0qg5/]
Note: 3pm in London time is 4pm in Brussels is 7am in San Francisco is 9am in Mexico City
