Kember 2016b

Sarah Kember, “At Risk? The Humanities and the Future of Academic Publishing,” Journal of Eletronic Publishing, “Disrupting theHumanities: Towards Posthumanities” 19.2 (Fall 2016). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/3336451.0019.210?view=text;rgn=main

“False dichotomies in the way we talk about publishing”: print/digital, fluid/fixed, closed/open

Open access debate is “top heavy, ideological, policy-driven, here in the UK at least” (12:50) — has the effect of streamlining what gets done in arts and humanities

“Trying to sift the notion of open from the notion of ethical in publishing” (14:12)

Ethics “takes you in the direction of thinking about process, publishing process, publishing relation” — cautions against another dichotomy between product and process, entities and relations

“Ethical publishing and open access publishing for me are slightly separate things but they’re often related in practice” (14:55)

“A desire to look again at the scholarly practices that underpin humanities, that was fundamentaly always or absolutely never in crisis — that’s disrupted & deconstructed not by the digital, not by any from-to temporality, but by an ongoing, longstanding process of engagning, coming up against, absorbing, ‘becoming with’ whatever the humanities isn’t” — those practicves “are no more or less stable than the humanities, but they are stabilized — they’re normalized, performed, ritualized, indicative of iral spread of audit culture within the body of the academy as we know”

Bergson: split of time and space — what’s vital, creative, experimental and what’s institutionalized/instrumental

“Scholarship for me is a vital thing and it’s an instrumental thing. It’s fundamentally institutional and it’s also fundamentally experimental. We cannot free it, liberate it, reform it, transform it, but we can probably instrumentalize it or institutionalize it a bet better. And what that means to me is in a Haraway phrase ‘staying with the trouble’ of academic capitalism.” (18:00)

“More responsible and more politically efficacious to deal with the relationship between scholarship and academic capitalism” (18:25)

Emphasis on openness, transparency, efficiency, accountability — audits, metrics citations indixes — but “what of differences and gender in and amongst all this governability?”

Ada journal

Scholarly-entrepreneur — “spectacular displays of productivity” — combining dusty scholar with media-saavy celeb

Not just joining “the innovation bandwagon in publishing” — “point is to intervene by at least striving to keep open the politics of communication, the politics of knowledge” — not new, always part of conversation

“More attuned to differences than to seeking to make transparent practices of peer review and citation” (24:20) — feed the REF but also making it ill, “creating possibility for faultlines and failures amongs auditabitliy and utility”

“Fine tradition of publishing stuff that messes up the boundaries of arts and humanities and social sciences and creates just a little bit of space for the poor scholar-entrepreneur to play.” (25:00)

Play is serious, play is gendered — writing as ultimate technique of re-worlding, repurposing where we’re at (Haraway)