30
Apr

Liberation bibliography: Towards open access to powerful knowledges to enhance forced migration advocacy

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The new Australian Research on Refugee Integration Database (ARRID) clearly demonstrates that there has been a proliferation of research on issues relating to forced migration over the last 10 years. This research translates into a large and rich body of scholarship, mostly published by academics in academic journals that are hidden behind paywalls. According to Lawson and colleagues (2015, 3), these are features of academic publishing “that help to define what commodities are, have been organised to provide a privileged and stratified access to this scholarly information and knowledge.” The competitive logics that characterise contemporary neoliberal higher education thus create an individualistic and metrics-driven approach to sharing knowledge, with academics uncomfortably complicit in the commodification of knowledge.

When it comes to research with a social justice mission, such as the complex and layered field of forced migration/refugee studies, this commodification is extremely problematic. It creates the highly unethical situation where many of the people who are participants, co-researchers or potential beneficiaries of the research are unable to gain access to the knowledge written about them.

In addition to the moral failure of making public/ publicly-funded knowledge inaccessible, in the sense that it is often funded by universities as public institutions, the commodification of information also means that the insights and learnings gleaned from forced migration research do not translate well or easily into (often much-needed) shifts in policy and practice. Our advocacy is therefore stymied if the research that is conducted is not publicly available.

The Refugee Education Special Interest Group (RESIG) has sought to redress these inequitable informational barriers by creating a version of what Barbara Fister (2010) calls ‘liberation bibliography’, which she argues “arises out of outrage at the injustice of the current system”. We have developed a series of resources, including ARRID and an open access annotated bibliography, which are created from a desire to signal solidarity, to bridge academic and ‘ordinary’ worlds, and to create a public good. In fact, we are in part creating what Lawson (2019) describes as a commons-based open access approach through the curation and promotion of collectively-created public resources. In doing so, we are actively seeking to resist and disrupt the persistent hegemony of neoliberal ideology in not only higher education, but in related sectors, such as schooling, settlement services, employment and community spaces.

We will end with the words of Fister (2010, 89), who so eloquently articulates the mission of liberation bibliography as taking “seriously the slogan, so often inscribed on academic buildings of a certain age, that the truth shall set us free—and that means freedom should extend to all of us, not just to a select class of employed academics and currently enrolled tuition-paying students”.

 

References

Fister, B. (2010). Liberating Knowledge: A Librarian’s Manifesto for Change, Thought & Action, 83–90.

Lawson (2019) Open Access Policy in the UK: From Neoliberalism to the Commons. Unpublished thesis. Birkbeck, University of London

Lawson, S, Sanders, K, Smith, L. (2015). Commodification of the Information Profession: A Critique of Higher Education Under Neoliberalism, Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication, 3(1):eP1182.

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