Our colleague Maywa Montenegro will be leading this panel in the upcoming 4S New Orleans Conference
- Maywa Montenegro, University of California, Davis
- Alastair Iles, University of California, Berkeley
- Akos Kokai, University of California, Berkeley
The privatization of public knowledge has become endemic to 21st
century times. From corporate battles over drug patents to seed wars,
knowledge produced in many forms, sites, spaces, and communities is
increasingly enclosed – that is, separated from its knowledge-makers and
commodified for the accumulation of capital. Science and technology are
at once driving and experiencing the effects of many contemporary
enclosures. To counter such trends in enclosures, in the past 15 years,
knowledge commons have materialized in some S&T fields (Frischmann,
Madison, and Strandburg, 2014), as well as in citizen-led movements such
as Wikipedia, Creative Commons, open access science databases, and
crowd-sourced science and nature platforms. Yet S&T knowledge is
also becoming important to building an array of material infrastructure
and institutions, in both the industrial- and developing world contexts
(e.g. energy commons and fishery commons). Many of these cases revive
traditional customs and norms, braiding centuries-old knowledges into
something ‘new.’
We welcome papers that explore the multiple dimensions of both
knowledge commons and how knowledge is being used to create or support
all varieties of commons. Some potential topics include: What are the
potential contributions of commons to helping regenerate and democratize
the everyday practice of science and technology? How does
knowledge-making enable and sustain the formation of commons, and whose
knowledge matters? What sorts of knowledge are produced within commons,
and how might these play a role in the identity and governance of
commons? How might new technologies update and reinvigorate commons
practices? How might it disrupt them? What does it mean to be
‘innovative’ in the context of a commons? Can we move from treating
knowledge as a resource to ‘thinking like commoners’?
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