Anticolonial Open Knowledge: Digital Curation for the Pluriverse

The Creative Commons, an open access project that works to make copyright free works available online, has vastly expanded the potential for the public to engage with material deemed important cultural works. Yet, many of these works have complicated legacies. Unchallenged, such online material could ironically and unintentionally serve as a means of reinstating old modes of domination.

Museums have been experimenting with ways to establish connections with contemporary postcolonial communities, and to come to terms with their historical role in exploiting otherness and displaying the spoils of empire. Practices, such as through making all their public domain works available through the Creative Commons, have helped increase accessibility and decentralize works away from institutions themselves.

However, making these works accessible only addresses one part of the issue. These newly available digital collections have the possibility of further unpacking colonialism and including more voices, but only if there’s space to curate content into nodes of new oppositional works that resist systems of domination.

This is a call for papers (and call-to-action) on topics relating to what cultural knowledge we grant access and for whose benefit, whose interpretations of culture are privileged, and how to design structures of collective sharing in ways that resist Eurocentrism and neo-coloniality. We’re seeking papers that historically contextualize digital archival practices, examine how access to cultural knowledge can encourage new readings and new assemblages of meaning, and how open access can support Art and Historical scholarship inclusive of diverse viewpoints and Global Majority participation.