New Issue of Anthropologies: Occupy and Science

“The March 2012 issue ofAnthropologies is out, and editor Ryan Anderson has put together an important collection on anthropology, the open access movement inside the field, and how anthropologists are engaging with the Occupy movement... I hope it is widely-read, as it has the potential to mark a shift towards a new way of doing anthropology... I am going to give an overview first, and then provide choice sections from each of the nine essays. What comes across most clearly in this issue is that we as anthropologists are among the 1%. We as US anthropologists, with access to AAA journals and universities with incredible built-up assets, can spend our time in research and commentary, backed by a wealth of time and a privilege of education to do work we love. Most of the 99%, inside or outside the United States, have nothing like that in their lives. What are we going to do about that? ... there is not an intellectual solution to our own political economy (our publishing), nor a singular answer to how we engage with change pragmatically and ethically and theoretically (what ‘occupy’ highlights). But these issues do require serious reflection and serious doing. They also challenge anthropologists to ‘get on the right side of history...’ So I see this special issue raising important discussion related to three important issues: [1] Production of and access to our research and ideas [2] How we relate to social change and social and economic justice and to participatory forms of change and engagement [3] The shift to a pragmatic anthropology, a moral anthropology (and what that means), an anthropology that makes a difference... Okay, onto the issue itself. I want to start with the last piece, written by Ryan Anderson. In “Anthropology and Occupy,” Ryan engages with the considerable amount of literature that has already been written since last fall (almost all of it online). As pointed out on Information Fluency about some of my own work in this area, this coverage is a new type of literature review – gathering together and reflecting on what is happening related to vital topics in a field, at a pace and with a breadth of coverage (and links!) that just cannot be matched by literature reviews in journals... The other four pieces focus more on open access, but often drawing inspiration from the occupy movement. Together these four show why open access matters professionally, ethically, and in the context of powerful economies changing the academy. Doug Rocks-Macqueen in The Last Days of Rome is particularly powerful on that last point, that the present publishing model used by the academy is unsustainable and is particularly detrimental to libraries and to people who want to publish book. Jason Jackson delivers a powerful essay on why ethically we need to change as scholars in how we approach publishing in his piece We are the One Percent: Open Access in the Era of Occupy Wall Street... Barbara Fister presents us the occupy view from libraries themselves in The Public Versus Publishers: How Scholars and Activists are Occupying the Library... ‘Libraries are a recognition that scholarship and culture are more than the business of creating and consuming. They are a human conversation, and libraries provide common ground where that conversation can take place and be remembered. By taking aim at the right for the public to maintain this conversation and its memory, publishers have shown us what we have to lose. It’s time we resisted the outsourcing of our common heritage by occupying the library.’ Finally, Kim and Mike Fortun deliver the brass tacks of how we can actually take a journal, including one as prominent as Cultural Anthropology, and make it open access with their piece Liberating Cultural Anthropology... That’s my overview. Head over to Anthropologies to access all the articles in their entirety...”