Innovative Academic Infrastructures: Digitalization, Collaboration, and Experimentation - I

Abstract

This open panel brings together scholars experimenting with innovative academic infrastructures in the form of digital scholarship and alternative research spaces inside and outside the university. This panel seeks to map novel configurations of knowledge production and distribution through different writing genres, media technologies, data sharing and archiving platforms, funding models, hiring and recruitment processes, publishing initiatives, and collaborative research projects. We are particularly interested in explorations and interventions that transcend or complicate both intellectual extractivism and the perpetuation of academic peripheries in post-colonial settings. We also welcome papers that critically examine the creation and reproduction of unequal epistemological geographies or those that explore the increasing use of scholarly metrics for career evaluation and job placement. We hope to spark an optimist and honest conversation about diverse academic futures given the ongoing corporatization and precarization of Higher-Ed in the global North and the longstanding patron-client bureaucratization of academia in the global South. This panel invites both empirical investigations and policy initiatives that allow us to develop transnational and comparative approaches to the study of academic infrastructures and human capacity building. The panel's goal is to map ways in which scholars across life cycles and regions have been able to open up spaces for new academic materialities, opportunities, practices, and possibilities.

Chair

• Alberto Eduardo Morales, University of California Irvine

Discussant

• Michael A Fortun, University of California, Irvine

Individual Presentations

• A Kaleidoscopic Approach to Academia in the Global South - Maria Elissa Torres Carrasco, Kaleidos Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography; Maka Suarez, Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography

• The Open Anthropology Lab: Encouraging Democratic and Innovative Languages, Formats, and Publics in Anthropology - Giselle Figueroa, Laboratorio de Antropología Abierta

• Scaling Barriers to Interdisciplinary Innovation: Beyond One-Size-Fits-All Approaches - Mel Stanfill, University of Central Florida; Anastasia Salter, University of Central Florida

Session Organizers

• Jorge Nunez, Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography

• Maka Suarez, Kaleidos - Center for Interdisciplinary Ethnography