Undoing scholarship: Towards an activist genealogy of the OA movement

Abstract

Abstract In this article, I argue to open out from critical strands within the Open Access (OA) movement, to propose a genealogy that embraces the activism of feminist, queer, anti-colonial, anti-racist, and labour movements active since the 1980s. By discussing contemporary forms of feminist and intersectional approaches to OA publishing against a background of grassroots activism since the 1980s, I aim to open out from the engagement of ‘concerned academics’ towards those activists who share a politics of struggle against capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal domination – across epistemological, disciplinary, and geographical boundaries. With this, I seek to tentatively articulate an approach to academic OA publishing in which academic and activist work is not perceived as something divided but as something that embodies different aspects of the same praxis online and offline.