Radial OA Conference: Panel 5. Chains of Equivalence: From Open Knowledge to Internet Piracy : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive

On 15th - 16th of June 2015 the Radical Open Access Conference took place at Coventry University, organised by the Centre for Disruptive Media. The conference gathered together a large community of presses, projects and thinkers exploring some of the more intellectually and politically exciting ways of understanding open access that are currently available internationally. Panel 5. Chains of Equivalence: From Open Knowledge to Internet Piracy Panel 5 will discuss the extent to which the open access movement is capable of establishing what the political philosopher Ernesto Laclau called ‘chains of equivalence' with other movements and struggles that are also dealing with aspects of openness – not just those associated with open knowledge, open science, open data, grey literature, altmetrics and so on, but also those areas in the arts, humanities and social sciences that conceive digital media more explicitly in terms of power, conflict and violence. Those associated with critical media theory, p2p networks and so-called ‘internet piracy’, for example. Can open access entertain the idea of establishing chains of equivalence without succumbing to fantasies of consensus, the sharing of standards and even interoperability. Would interoperability, in which a multitude of distributed systems, platforms and repositories are indexed and linked, so that their contents can be located by all the main search engines and harvesters, not render undesirable the idea of having a plurality of movements, theories and philosophies that may at times conflict and contradict one another, but which can nevertheless contribute to the construction of a common, oppositional horizon?