What concepts, ideas and examples from this text contribute to the theory and practice of archive ethnography?
Adema describes “radical open access” as a “process of continual critique” (p. 6) that is not confined to one definition or object, but is rather an “ongoing collective and critical project” made up of various “groups, peoples, institutions, and projects” (p. 13) striving to use open access as an alternative to the current neoblieral model promoted by the academic publishing industry. However, in analyzing present alternative models of open access, the author finds some commonalities between the projects: 1) They offer practical and affirmative engagement with open access: providing open access to their research is central to their publishing practices. 2) Their openness allows for collaboration and community building and engagement. 3) They serve to question the (commericial) academic system of publishing (pp. 16-17). Overall, this multi-faceted and "open" concept of "radical open access," can help archival ethnographic scholars explore the various ways they can construct alternative spaces via digital archives, which both challenge neoliberal norms and facilitate community-based collaboration and knowledge sharing, making knowledge production less of a commodity and, instead, more of a community building project.
What evidence or examples support the main argument, narrative or e/affect?
The author provides examples of how different scholars are using open source/access platforms to develop and/or share their work with other scholars and the public such as the Open Humanities Press (OHP), Ted Stripha’s Differences and Reptitions wiki, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s experiment with open peer review for her book through her site MediaCommons.
Exemplary quotes or images?
I really liked the way the author uses Balibar’s conceptualization of democracy as an ongoing process to describe radical open access as “not as a homogenous project striving to become a dominant model or force, not as a thing, an object, or a model with prescribed meaning or ideology, but as a project with an unknown outcome, as an ongoing series of critical struggles” (p. 20).
What questions or types of analysis does this text suggest for your own work?
The chapter made me think about how I could use some of these open access platforms to both develop and receive feedback on my writing or projects. It also made me reconsider how “openess” in terms of collaboration and data sharing can help structure my research process in a way that can serve to challenge the dominant neoliberal norms within academia.
Janneke Adema's chapter on challenges of, and experiments in radical openness (defined by her as "practices and theories of radical open access are critical of openness in its neoliberal guises, but still try to engage with the open in an affirmative way too” p. 5) can offer several interventions for archive ethnography, and I offer a few of those here in the form of questions:
(1) What is the political economy of knowledge production for archive ethnography?
Since the book's departure is a push against the commodification of the book and the neoliberalism of the university (both circulates empty signifiers that reproduce sameness), both projects in which ethnographers are emplaced in, what conditions make archive ethnography possible? The author notes the issue of cost and volunteer labor, for example, that can look very different depending on what model of openness is under question: “Many scholar-led and not-for-profit projects therefore try to redirect this volunteer labor where possible toward more progressive forms of publishing—for example, by shifting it away from commercial, profit-driven publishers and gifting it to developing, not-for-profit, open access projects instead, as Mattering Press is doing.” (39) Since ethnographic fieldwork and archiving involves a lot of volunteer labor, getting at what is at stake for archive ethnography within this political economy, would be helpful.
(2) What publics (following last week's article on civic community archiving that cites Dewey's call to provoke publics into existence) do radical openness and experimentation provoke into existence?
I am thinking about the concept of "hyperpolitics" cited in this chapter: “hyperpolitics “names a refusal to consider the question of politics as closed or decided in advance, and a concomitant willingness to open up an unconditional space for thinking about politics and the political ‘beyond’ the way in which they have been conventionally conceived—a thinking of politics which is more than politics, while still being political” (p. 22). The closure of political space is very real and frightening, but is all closure necessarily bad? Is there a way to think about closure and gatekeeping as a public good, that too, provoke publics into existence? How could archive ethnography hold space for both openness and closure?
(3) What goes into making radical openness and experimentation sustainable, and is that a necessary goal?
When reading about experiments in radical openness, I was curious to know what happened to earlier experiments mentioned in the book but those that are not updated anymore? Considering that most experiments are scholar-led, what happens when those scholars are no longer in the picture for various reasons? I am thinking about the question of preservation (and reanalysis) in a decentralized way: how can archive ethnography support a broad community of practitioners?
"A scholarly poethics, conceptualized as such, would include forms of oppenness that do not either simply repeat established forms (such as the closed print-based book, single authorship, linear thought, copyright, exploitative publishing relationships) or succumb to the closures that its own implementation (e.g., through commerical adaptations) and institutionalization (e.g. as part of a top down policy mandates) of necessity also implies and brings with it" (Adema 2021, 44).
Adema compels the reader to radically reimagine the traditional relationship between the researcher and reader, as well as the ethics that accompany it. While previous works, through traditional book practice, have been exploitative on a number of levels, radical open access (as Adema calls it) seeks to dismantle systems of exploitation bound up in the publishing process. This can bolster the practice of archive ethnography by opening up a pool of who reads and contributes to knowledge production. Radically reimagining access to knowledge production allows us to critically ask questions about whose type of knowledge is legitimated, why, and for what purpose?
I use the same preface in both of these annotations - please correct me if my understanding and internalization of the article is not representative of the author’s intentions. How I apply this article to the theory and practice of archive ethnography is once again through intentionality of the researcher. It makes practical sense to consider a contemporary digital platform to publish findings and archive data. However, the individual researcher must make a decision for themselves, using their personal orientation to their work and the community they study to publish in an open access space. As an archive ethnographer, one must resolve for themselves if their purpose is to contribute to academic discourse solely or if they would want to engage the broader community. Because data management is central to archive ethnography, the question of radical open access, open politics (the communicative power of the information), and the process of experimentation will be essential to each project. While I recognize that there are significant considerations regarding radical open access, the author demonstrates that there are researchers who are dedicated to shaping the platform and function to be secure, reflexive, and “intellectually reinvigorating”. If the community-subject is comfortable with the open access, it seems to make the most sense that the community should be able to access the work. The push against commercialization surfaces throughout the article and this feels especially related to archive ethnography as the researcher has the ability to position their work to be accessible to the communities that they study (which, in many cases, are not academics).
The call for a scholarly poethics sounds to me like a call for making a record of our scholarly relations just as we would make a record of our scholarly edits. A focus on relations asks us to defocus around static boundaries of book-object and scholar-individual to instead collect and organize data differently.
Open scholarship, open access, openness, open science, radical open access, open politics.