Latest

Experimental Publishing Compendium

How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’.

'Experimenting With Copyright Licences' (blogpost for the COPIM project - part of the documentation for the first book coming out of the Combinatorial Books Pilot)

Recent-ish publications

Review of Bitstreams: The Future of Digital Literary Heritage' by Matthew Kirschenbaum

Contribution to 'Archipiélago Crítico. ¡Formado está! ¡Naveguémoslo!' (invited talk: in Spanish translation with English subtitles)

'Defund Culture' (journal article)

How to Practise the Culture-led Re-Commoning of Cities (printable poster), Partisan Social Club, adjusted by Gary Hall

'Pluriversal Socialism - The Very Idea' (journal article)

'Writing Against Elitism with A Stubborn Fury' (podcast)

'The Uberfication of the University - with Gary Hall' (podcast)

'"La modernidad fue un "blip" en el sistema": sobre teorías y disrupciones con Gary Hall' ['"Modernity was a "blip" in the system": on theories and disruptions with Gary Hall']' (press interview in Colombia)

'Combinatorial Books - Gathering Flowers', with Janneke Adema and Gabriela Méndez Cota - Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 (blog post)

Open Access

Most of Gary's work is freely available to read and download either here in Media Gifts or in Coventry University's online repositories PURE here, or in Humanities Commons here

Radical Open Access

Radical Open Access Virtual Book Stand

'"Communists of Knowledge"? A case for the implementation of "radical open access" in the humanities and social sciences' (an MA dissertation about the ROAC by Ellie Masterman). 

Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM) project

« Radical Methodologies for the Posthumanities: Third Disrupting the Humanities seminar | Main | The Crossick Report and the Strange Case of the Missing Monograph Crisis »
Saturday
Feb072015

How to Produce a Critique of ‘Open’ in 3 Easy Steps

The Automatic Academic Article and Book Generator™
 

No. 16. How to Produce a Critique of ‘Open’ in 3 Easy Steps 

 

Step 1)  Set up something you are calling ‘open’ as a straw man by projecting a narrow and weak understanding of openness onto it.

Step 2) Attack this understanding of ‘open’.*
  

Step 3) Present your own version of ‘open’ as an alternative. This allows you to be the hero of your own narrative by in effect saving ‘open’ from itself.  

 

No need to worry about your version of open having already been explored in a more nuanced and rigorous fashion within the movements for open access, open education, open knowledge and so forth. The beauty of this simple, easy to replicate 3-step process is that, by setting up open as a straw man and defining it in a way that serves your own interests, you avoid having to pay attention to any of this.  

References available on request. 

  

* Important: if your critique involves making a careful reading of thinkers from the history of openness, you absolutely must, must, must remember not to show the same kind of ethical responsibility and hospitality toward contemporary thinkers of what you are calling ‘open’. 

 

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