Call for Proposals: Towards an Open Future | Symposium 2020

Call for Proposals: Towards an Open Future | 2020 Symposium

Applications due by: January 15, 2020, midnight EST. 

Symposium date: Friday, April 24 2020 

Application form: https://forms.gle/4QfesLXUag4bxXCh6

In recent years, there has been increasingly widespread, international attention to “open” in its many forms across the scholarly landscape: open access publishing, open educational resources, open data, and more. From this vantage point, we can collectively begin to look towards securing the future of “open,” with alternatives to commercialized educational content and scholarly publishing more imaginable than ever before. 

Towards an Open Future | 2020 Symposium seeks to put the theoretical framework of “open” in direct conversation with its widespread praxis. We seek to interrogate the terminology and impact of open education, open scholarship, and open pedagogy through a lens that is expansive and inclusive, bringing in considerations of labor, representation, decolonial perspectives, and critical pedagogies. On the large scale as well as in the smallest iteration, who decides what “open” looks like? How do we begin to hold definitions for terms that contain a shifting body of knowledge? Open for what purpose, and open for whom? 

The Graduate Center Library invites proposals that meaningfully engage with the above questions, for an audience of Graduate Center students, librarians, and faculty. We encourage proposals from within and beyond academia, and submissions for individual presentations, interactive workshops, or other formats. The Keynote address will be delivered by technology journalist Audrey Watters

Additional considerations

How can “open” be used as a tool to bridge representational gaps between academia and its wider publics? 

Are there ways in which “open educational access” seeks to include student feedback in the process of creating resources, and co-curators of educational materials? 

In what sense does “open” meaningfully intersect with decolonial teaching strategies? 

Does the project of “open education” contain an implicit framework or mission? 

How do open educational resources impact pedagogy, both for individual instructors and within their discipline? 

In a world shaped by platform surveillance and privacy concerns, might there be advantages to “closed”? 


Feel free to reach out with questions to:

Emily Drabinski, Critical Pedagogy Librarian – edrabinski@gc.cuny.edu

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, Head of Reference – ssmith4@gc.cuny.edu

Elvis Bakaitis, Adjunct Reference Librarian & OER Coordinator – ebakaitis@gc.cuny.edu

About the Author

Elvis Bakaitis is currently the Head of Reference at the Mina Rees Library. They're also proud to serve on the University LGBTQ Council, and as a board member of CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.