On Labour, OERs, and Thievery

This is probably going to be a long post because there are many interconnected threads to what I want to talk about this week. The nuggets of this post started with the work that I have been doing over the last few weeks to accurately record all the things I do during my work time. I am recording literally all the things. I am also trying to be aware of all the work I am paid for as part of my day job things that I have actually been doing outside of work time. It has really been enlightening as I have discovered that when I write all the things down that I am doing too much, really I am doing too much, and also that there are things that I am doing like listening to podcasts and reading pedagogical books that I should be doing during work time because I am giving my large institution with deep pockets free labour. There are real reflective benefits to doing this work, but there is also an aspect of Taylorism to it as well, as Jenny Odell's new book talks a lot about (see this is what happens when you do this work, you realize you should be reading novels and other kinds of books on the weekend instead of books for work).

This forensic accounting also has me thinking about just how much free labour that is not acknowledged so many of us put out there and is taken up by folk who already have a massive amount of social capital. Basically we are doing their work for them and they are making a lot of money off of our work while the marginalized and multimarginalized folk who need money to pay rent, buy medicine, buy food, and take care of their families are denied access to the very spaces that these social capital rich edustars thrive and actively forget to think of or mention disability or accessibility in.

And then sarah madoka currie had her successful dissertation defense on Wednesday and showed us all how it could be done, how it definitely should be and isn't. Her dissertation and defence of this dissertation "asked critical questions about the extent to which academia holds itself accountable for its own exploitative nature: when i take these stories for my research, what do i owe them? what could reciprocal, ethical research look like?" (tweet by sarah madoka currie). This whole process was one of community building and sharing of resources, stories, ideas in a reciprocal and respectful and caring way.  Her citation practices which I quote here from the tweet :"i went REALLY out of my way to not cite"canon" scholars, i cited ALL open-access resources with only 33 exceptions, i prioritized citing bipoc/ fnim / marginalized / non-tenured/ non-academic allies. in a lot of ways this was a love letter to community building" demonstrated that there is so many great ideas and work being done out there that is not found in academic publishing spaces that is just as important, just as (and even more) necessary, and that the publication and academic systems gatekeep what is seen as of value. 

And then she shared all her defence slides, and then she shared her dissertation. This sort of radical openness, similar to what Brenna Clarke Gray did with her tenure and promotion portfolio, is both rare in academe, and exactly the kinds of things those who already have social capital will take and extract more from for their own benefit. And this is the ethical risk of doing this kind of disruption. Very few who have benefited from those systems are interested in disrupting those systems (and why would they as they sip Mai Tais in Hawaii) and will continue to treat humans as their own personal OERs, scraping information and data to use in their keynotes, their articles, their grants, their podcasts without acknowledgement. And the ones who get away with this the most are often the folk with words ethics or EDI (DEI) in their bios. The same ones with edtech ethics or UDL in their bios who continue to retweet tweets without alt text in their performative allyship as they continue to make sure only some folk get to engage with information. The people who could use their position to have different voices and faces as keynotes at their conferences, but will not support disabled and queer and Black and Indigenous folk to talk (even if they themselves identify as such) because they want to make sure they do not lose their position in that normative academic space and want to reinforce a LookImJustLikeYouIsm to academic administrators.  

How many disabled folk have difficulty finding non-precarious work, because so many others take their amazing ideas and work and pretend it is their own, with no acknowledgement, to speak to things they know nothing about and in turn make it worse for disabled folk who are looking to share in these spaces. So many times I am in workshops and conferences where I ask myself why was this the person they picked to speak. Like the union workshop where the person said we should not use the word disabled because that positions us as "less than" with the employer and others quickly agreed in the chat and I wanted to scream take your internalized ableism elsewhere. Or the person who said to me and a cowriter that they would help us get published in a HigherEd daily and that amounted to them sending an email with us cc'd on it and then asking us to stop cc'ing him on subsequent emails. Or the journal who considered publishing our piece, but only if we rewrite it completely to change the focus from language to accessibility laws that are not applicable in the country where I live. Or the podcast that came out this week that basically verbatim said what I said in episode 3 of my podcast and no where mentioned me or it. So at what point does radical openness (radical as in wow this is a new great way we should do things) lead to radical thievery (radical as etymologically foundational or the root) by other academics? Is taking foundational to this space; yes- are you personally doing something to disrupt that is what I am asking you. 

As an aside I super enjoy the example from the Century Dictionary found under the etymology of thief of the difference between thief and robber. It made me question at what point do the small amounts become large in academe. And also as an aside aside, when I was in grade 1 I had a really really hard time with 'th' sounds and thief and teeth were two words I very much could not say and I had to work with a speech therapist the school assigned to support this. 

What sarah's dissertation acknowledged was all the great work being put out there, the work of pushing against the systems that oppress and surveil and exclude and erase in different ways. Folk in community who put information out there and work to share resources and ideas don't do it for parades, don't do it for medals or really ugly POD lamps, we do it to support others in creating a more inclusive space to be and to learn. The fact that only a few of the same folk get the grants and full-time positions and book deals and publications is because instead of acknowledging the labour you have learned from, you extract and run (mainly because so many of us literally can't chase you- my crip humour for Sunday morning). We need more people who want to use their space and positions to support and highlight the work already out there, the work that is hiding in grey literature space and other open education spaces, to say those names out loud, to write them in the references, to send emails to put people in contact and not ask to be un-cc'd in a "my work here is done" way after one email.  How different would academe be if you did that instead of taking info to support your 10K speaking fee keynote, as folk jigsaw courses together to pay rent over the summer, or are rejected for yet another grant or position because of their lived experience or their critical disability studies research doesn't have a SSHRC category? Please just acknowledge people and the labour they have put in, acknowledge, and build communities not peer-reviewed gates. Basically what could an academe like that look like I ask you? sarah this week showed us what it could be and I really refuse to go back.