The alt can’t challenge biopolitics—their romanticized view of open access still leaves bare life unquestioned—can’t solve the aff

Rosemary J., Professor, Canada Research Chair, Graduate Program Director of Anthropology in Law & Society (LASO), Socio-Legal Studies (SLST), and Social and Political Thought (SPTH) @ York University; Susannah, PhD Anthropology from University of Georgia, research fellow @ University of Queensland. “Ethnographic Explorations of Intellectual Propertyfree,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Anthropology. 27 August 2020. LJS

As anthropologists reassessed their research and publication practices with respect to marginalized communities, digital technologies were transforming the means by which texts could be shared in the discipline, spurring new social movements concerned with the production and circulation of informational goods, which attracted ethnographic inquiry. FLOSS (free [libre] and open source software) and open access publishing (OAP) movements were based on beliefs that new technologies should facilitate the dissemination of knowledge and democratize an informational commons. OAP offered an especially attractive antidote in an environment marked by increasingly expansive IP rights, escalating prices, and industry concentration that threatened to undermine the dissemination of anthropological knowledge. Scholar advocates encouraged their professional associations to adopt new publishing practices to enhance the circulation of scholarship; lively debates ensued about the meaning of open access and its relationship to research ethics and creative alternatives for managing and disseminating research data (Golub 2004; Kelty 2008). OAP ideally made anthropological knowledge more available to subject communities, providing a new means for crafting more ethical research practice (Boellstorf et al. 2008). A number of journals dedicated to making anthropological work more accessible to broader publics emerged. The journal Cultural Anthropology, HAU books, the HAU journal Journal of Ethnographic Theory, and various blogs published ethnographic reviews, commentaries, and conversations for ever-broader publics. Such projects prompted a new wave of scholarship exploring the economic, technical, and institutional constraints shaping publishing practices. As open access became increasingly monetized, however, questions emerged about the financial and organizational capacity of publishers to prioritize accessibility. Conversations about access turned to more general deliberations over openness and inclusivity in the production of knowledge and in knowledge exchange (Gershon 2018; West 2018). Deliberations on the nature of relationships and obligations that were carried into op en access projects (e.g., LaFlamme and Boyer 2018; Mahi Tahi Collective 2018) tended to echo earlier criticisms of the advocacy of an overly romanticized public domain that failed to recognize how old exclusions may be reproduced and new forms of dispossession facilitated when “freedom” was celebrated but structural positions of privilege and precarity remained unchallenged.