This blog is finally back, after far too long a hiatus. I want to follow up on a recommendation given to me by my once-collegue Camelia Elias; why share my thoughts freely here on my blog? I once wrote about why I blog, and some answers can be found there. However, there is another reason why I feel it is vital to share academic (or any other kind of) work. I will call this FOAW - free open academic work, obviously modeled after the acronym FOSS - free open source software. Free open source software is a concept mixed by two schools of thought, free software and open source software. Although there are differences, the basic ideal can be seen as the need for providing full and unlimited access to the code of a piece of software, and the right to study and modify said source. While free generally means free as in beer, the significant meaning is free as in speech.
Similar for free open academic work, which is what I’ll be discussing here. It is standard and proper practice for academics to present their sources and discuss agreements and disagreements in the open. What is generally not shared, are works in progress, course notes and similar academic bread-and-butter work. Some of the reasons for this is obvious and understandable: works in progress are not finished and may contain embarrassing mistakes, unclear rubbish and stuff that borders on plaigiarism if released because quotes haven’t been fully worked through. Course notes may be incomprehensible to others and include material that is copyright protected and cannot be shared publicly.
However, there are other less worthy reasons for doing the same things: a fear that people will steal your material, reduce your worth as teacher because others steal your ideas for groundbreaking courses, etc. In other words, we are dealing with a concern about academic capital: our research and our teaching (to a lesser extent) is what sell us to universities, provide us with research grants and get our conference papers accepted. A very understandable concern then arises that if we share our work, our value is decreased and we will lose our positions, grants and conference attendance. This view corresponds completely to typical, capitalist exchange.
Put in Althusserian terms, by reproducing academic labor power there is also a reproduction of submission to ruling ideology. An academic who does not share his or her work steps into this trap of submitting to an ISA which reduces academic thinking to a commodity like any other. Lack of sharing means viewing creative thinking and critical thinking as a commodity that can only be produced by the academic laborer, but still a commodity.
However, unlike regular commodities that are consumed, creative and critical thinking grows rather than diminishes when shared; they are not spread too thin, but instead (hopefully) inspire others to generate more creative and critical thinking. My argument is therefore a call for FOAW - free open academic work - which will not reduce academic capital, but instead produce more. As an academic who shares, it becomes possible to be a “bad subject” who rejects the ISA which reduces academic work to fixed-value commodities. I don’t agree with this view, and so will share my work. I don’t believe that this will create a perfect, ideal world, for there are also negative sides to sharing, which I need to think more carefully about. For now, let this stand as a call to more academic sharing - either in blogging form or any other.
