Join Langara, Kwantlen, BCIT, SFU, and UBC for an exciting half-day celebration of Open Access Week. This year’s theme from SPARC is Open for Whom? Equity in Open Knowledge. Our keynote speaker, Jessie Loyer, will explore this question alongside participants through the lens of decolonization. The conversation will continue with local panelists engaged in open knowledge work.

Summary of Jessie’s talk
Sometimes when folks are in the midst of a monumental, feel-good shift, they fail to realize who has been excluded from that space. Librarians and scholars have been advocating the ideals of open access for many years and have seen the exciting changes the movement creates for public knowledge. Yet we rarely think about whose voices are absent and the structures of power that limit this project. Together, we’ll query our positionality in these spaces, and consider how the politics of refusal and an ethic of care might intersect to complicate the open access movement, potentially creating futurities of reciprocity. If rethought as a tool of resurgence, open access can support justice.