 All right. Thank you. Okay, so welcome everyone. Thank you for coming today to open education through an ethics of care and justice. For a brief introduction, my name is Kristen lands down my pronouns are she her, and I'm currently the diversity resident librarian for open educational resources at the University of Wisconsin Madison. I completed my master's in library and information science in 2019 at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. And my master's education in counseling in 2017 and my bachelor of arts and both psychology and women agenda studies in 2014 at the Paul University in Chicago which is my hometown. So my women's gender studies concentration was race class and gender. So my knowledge is informed by my educational background and my experience as a school counselor librarian and identifying as a black feminist. So the idea for this presentation came from reading this quote from Audrey waters from her 2015 2014 talk at open con that reads, we need an ethics of care of justice not simply to assume that open does the work of those for us. And I'm a member of sigma gamma roast already incorporated which is one of the nine historically black sororities and fraternities. And when I was joining my sorority always tell us to remember our why, and that it would be important to always come back to our why over the course of our lifetime and membership. And so this presentation is kind of a compilation of thoughts I've had about finding a new why to underscore my work in open education. I'm going to start with a brief introduction to the foundational concepts of black feminism. We're going to talk about what is black feminism and what distinguishes black feminism from other feminisms. And we're going to go over the combined river collective and statement and Patricia hill Collins black feminist thoughts. So the combined river collective was a black feminist lesbian social organization that was active in Boston, Massachusetts from 1974 to 1980. The collective's name is in reference to what was essentially a military mission that Harriet Tubman Tubman led in 1863, called the combined river raid that was in South Carolina. Harriet Tubman freed more than 750 enslaved people and was the first and only military mission led by a woman during the American Civil War. The combined river statement is a cornerstone of black feminism. The major points outlined in the statement include identity politics, meaning that the writers felt that black women's issues were not being prioritized and other movements. So they felt it necessary to focus on their own specific oppression and felt a solidarity with other black women in their community. They acknowledged multiple oppression stating that they found it difficult to separate race class and sex, because they experienced them simultaneously. To the concept of intersectionality, the term that was coined by Kimberly Crenshaw in 1989 to explain how various social identities intersect to create unique experiences of oppression. Another distinguishing feature of black feminism was that black black women felt that solidarity with black men was crucial, whereas white feminist at the time took more of a separatist approach. Black women recognized that the shared struggle of racism was also, you know, it was a shared struggle of racism with black men, but they also struggled with black men over the sexism that they faced. And besides being anti patriarchy, the writers were socialists who believed that a socialist revolution that was not also feminist and anti racist would not guarantee black women's liberation. They also rejected the lesbian separatism of earlier feminist movements and considered biological determinism a dangerous and reactionary politic. The group also valued collectiveness and a non hierarchical power distribution in their organization, which they felt mirrored the vision that they had for a revolutionary society. So they started in study groups to discuss issues and wanted to create black feminist publications to distribute and teach others. Next we'll talk about black feminist thoughts, which was originally published in 1990, with the second edition coming out 10 years later in 2000. It's a foundational text for black feminism. In it Collins writes that the experience of being a black woman shapes the consciousness of black women resulting in a collective wisdom and knowledge, which she's a standpoint to me knowledge here. She also recognizes that black women are not a monolith and don't share a universal experience, because we share common challenges but experience black womanhood and varying ways. There's different ways of engaging with black feminism, which will quite see the S on there, because there are different types of feminisms. Collins writes that black feminist thought and black feminist practice are informed by one another, and black feminism is a critical social theory which gives black women tools to resist oppression. Colin talks about intellectual labor and that black feminist thought is created both within and outside of academia, making this feminism accessible across social identities. Black feminist thought and black feminist practice are dynamic and changing as social conditions change. So they're constantly evolving. And finally black feminism takes a humanistic approach, viewing the struggle of black women's liberation as connected to the struggles of other marginalized people globally. In her book talking back thinking feminists thinking black, bell hooks writes when Audrey Lord made that much quoted yet often misunderstood cautionary statement warning us that the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. She was urging us to remember what we must that we must engage in a process of visionary thinking that transcends the ways of knowing privileged by the oppressive powerful, if we are to truly make revolutionary change. I want to hear the part about ways of knowing that are privileged by the oppressive powerful because we'll come back to this a little bit later. So I mentioned in my introduction that I have a master's in counseling. And so all mental health professionals work from a theoretical orientation which is their philosophy on working with clients. One way that we conceptualize this in our education is through what's called the ways paradigm, which was a coin termed in 2000 by Sharon Cheston. During our educational training and throughout working with clients counselors are encouraged to continuously reflect on our theoretical orientations. And so that is where these three kind of frameworks come into play. So way of being is related to the counselor's presence with you in the space. So thinking about body language how they convey active listening what their setting boundaries looks like how they express empathy and how they use eye contact way of understanding is about how counselors understand human development personality theory, how humans change consciousness and unconsciousness and more. And then way of intervening refers to the techniques skills and treatments that your counselor uses and working with you. So we're going to take a look at how the following concepts and practices can be applied to open education, using the ways paradigm to organize the information. And this is how my brain works basically. So we're going to take the black feminist foundation, and then more the contemporary black feminist stuff, and then plug it into different ways of understanding being an intervening in open ed. So how can black feminism inform open educational practice. We're going to start by looking at a few definitions of open education. It defines open education as encompassing resources tools and practices that are free of legal financial and technical barriers, and can be fully used shared and adapted in the digital environment. They say that open educational resources or are the foundation of open education. The open education consortium has a similar definition, but state that the resources tools and practices that employ a framework of open sharing improve educational access and effectiveness worldwide. The Office of Educational Technology believes that educational opportunities should be available to all learners. Their definition also states that creating an open education ecosystem involves making learning materials data and educational opportunities available without restrictions imposed by copyright laws access barriers or exclusive proprietary systems that lack interoperability and limit the free exchange of information. So the thoughts that I've been having around defining open education are that sometimes I see, you know, equity diversity inclusion and accessibility mentioned as the benefits of open. And the definitions typically do mention access and barriers, but what if the foundation of open education wasn't OER but it was justice. I mean, Adrian Marie Brown wrote a blog post that said emergent strategy is strategy, a plan towards a goal based in the science of emergence, the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions, rather than laying out big strategic work. The invitation of emergent strategy is to come together in community, build authentic relationships and see what emerges from the conversations connections, visions and needs. Adrian's book emergent strategy outlines nine principles of emergent strategy. So it's interesting that Adrian uses the science of emergent to emergence to frame her work, because the open education definition from the Office of educational technology talks about an open education ecosystem. So I have not been in a science class in a minute, so I had to go to Encyclopedia Britannica real quick to look up the definition of ecosystem. And so they define it as the complex of living organisms, their physical environment and all their relationships in a particular unit of space. And so I think that these principles provide a new way of understanding to build this open ecosystem. So the principles are that small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small. Change is constant, be like water. There's always enough time for the right work. There is a conversation in the room that only these people in this moment can have find it. Never a failure, always a lesson. Trust the people. If you trust the people, they become trustworthy. Move at the speed of trust and focus on critical connections more than critical mass, build the resilience by building the relationships. And so you have more presence and what you pay attention to grows. Next, I want to talk about Maryam Kaba's book. We do this till we free us abolitionist organizing and transforming justice. Maryam Kaba is a renowned prison abolitionist and organizer in the chapter joined the abolitionist movement, which is an interview with rebel steps. And if you declare yourself an abolitionist, you're making a few basic commitments. She says abolition calls for the elimination of policing imprisonment and surveillance surveillance. It rejects the expansion and legitimization of all acts, all aspects of the prison industrial complex, including surveillance, policing and imprisonment of all sorts. She says premature death and abandonment. She goes on to say that you can advocate for radical reform around these areas without defining yourself as an abolitionist, but in order to avoid cooptation. She really holds the line on those court commitments, if you were to call yourself an abolitionist. So, basically, I'm not here to tell you to become an abolitionist. That's outside of my scope of practice. These beliefs and practices from abolitionists I think can be applied to open education. In this quote, Maryam Kaba talks about abolition as a vision of a restructured society in a world where we have everything we need. Food, shelter, education, health, art, beauty, clean water, and more things that are foundational to our personal and community safety. Kaba often reinforces the importance of collective care, accountability and responsibility, and encourages us to try many small experiments and makes the connection between the prison industrial complex and systems of oppression including capitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy. I hardly believe that open educational, open education practitioners can dismantle these systems through open education alone, but Kaba's emphasis on collective responsibility gives us guidance for moving toward justice. A few of the quotes that I pulled from the book say, she was a human being and restoring our awareness of the humanity of prisoners is a crucial step toward undoing the harms of mass incarceration. And there she was speaking about the death of a woman prisoner in custody. I don't believe in self care, I believe in collective care, collectivizing our care and thinking more about how we can help each other. I personally believe in self care but I think that this is a really good, you know, example of what she means when she talks about collective care. Leah Hartman remarked that care is the antidote to violence. Her words offer a potentially powerful feminist frame for abolition. Effective defense campaigns provide thousands of people with opportunities to demonstrate care for criminalized individuals through various tactics including letter writing, financial support, prison visits and more. Next, Leah Lakshmi Pyechna Shimashina is a queer disabled film writer, organizer, performance artist and educator who wrote the book Care Work, Dreaming Disability Justice from her bed. They talk about disability justice in ways that I think able-bodied folks can also use to build a new way of being when it comes to open education. Leah writes in regard to emergency care webs that people start, emergency care webs that people start when they, when an able-bodied person experiences a temporary disability. So like maybe they broke their leg or broke an ankle or broke their arm. They write that these models have a lot to learn from disability justice models of centering sustainability, slowness and building for the long haul. This is also important because many people doing work in open education are disabled, chronically ill, neurodiverse are living with mental illnesses. I myself am in a number of those categories. And so in Tema Okun's 1999 document about white supremacy culture characteristics in organizations, they write that one white supremacy characteristic is urgency. And so we can and should slow down and take the time to build towards our goals. Leah also writes that one quality of disability justice culture is its beauty and practicality. They write that poetry and dance are as valuable as a blog post about access hacks. And that this goes back to what the Bell Hooks quote earlier about what types of knowledge are privileged. So what types of knowledge are privileged. So are we just privileging textbooks or things that are considered scholarly versus what about an OER that is written by the group on campus that is run by disabled students where they create a guidebook that is for new transferring incoming students about access hacks on their campus. Okay. So we've gone through all of that information. How can we connect these values concepts and theories to open education. So I'm building a new understanding of open. For me justice is the foundation. From there we can incorporate all of the nine emergent strategy principles I think are good underlying ways of understanding. So experiment fail learn sometimes other people's fear of failure holds you back from trying new things and having the opportunity to even fail so that you can learn. You could also have a successful endeavor but you'll never know because other people are fearful of fail of failure. So it's important to try to build a culture where you know failure is a lesson and it's not something to be viewed negatively. Collectiveness is a common thread throughout this presentation from various feminist thinkers. And I told someone the other day I asked you know they asked me where would I recommend that faculty start with OER. And one of the things that I said was like they don't have to go it alone like they don't have to do this all by themselves that they can find co-authors and editors through places like the Rebus community or they can tap into colleagues in their department. And I myself can provide support around you know some of the more like technical pieces but also to help them build a community of practice so that they're able to you know connect with other colleagues who are doing similar work. But it's not just authors who need support you know folks working in open need support too. So I have a fantastic team with my supervisor who's the director of scholarly communications and the curricular content librarian. And then we also have an open education working group. So it makes things feel a lot less overwhelming especially as someone who's a diversity resident librarian which means that my term is limited for three years. And you know a lot of is in flux about you know how much time how much can you get done in these three years how much can will go on if you have to leave things like that. So being flexible to change, because it's going to happen. Anyone that's in meetings with me is probably like girl. But there's so many times where we talk about like professors or faculty or instructors that are resistant to change. And my answer is always like, we're changing though. So I'm not going to be catering to this like need to you know stay in the past. We're changing and you know you got to come along for the ride are you going to be left behind. So, you know, I think that that is a real, real value to to bring into open at all times. So, small as all is another really important concept for me. I had a staff member in another department they were putting on an event about open educational resources and I emailed to ask if I could speak at it. And, you know, one of the things he told me was he wasn't sure if it was worth my time because you know they don't get a lot of people that come like maybe less than 10. I was like that's perfect. I love any amount of people that could be one person there and I'm coming. So, you know, trying to talk about we are at a research one institution, anyone that's there. That's great for me. So, you know, small is all for me like I can do an event for two people and that is fine, building slowly and building with a small group that can then go out and spread that is a value for me. I also think that it's related a bit to the white supremacy characteristic that's outlined by a coon of progress is bigger or more, and that quantity over quality is always best. And we know that those things are not true. So for a way of being so if you remember this is how we are with our people in our open ecosystem using patients. So your instructors and maybe you as well may live with chronic illness be disabled be mentally ill neurodiverse, have patients and resist that pull of urgency and sometimes the urgency that administration or other department heads are putting on you. I think I mentioned that I'm chronically ill I have mental health issues. I'm neurodiverse ADHD. So like sometimes things are getting really in the weeds. So, you know, I have to have patients with myself and that's a good thing to practice because then you can extend it to others. Start with trust, building individual relationships begins with trust, giving people the benefit of the doubt and believing in people from the start. There's a quote from Miriam Kaba in her book about how she trust people until they prove themselves to be untrustworthy. I think that's a really good place to start. There's I feel like a lot of people when they're in a position for a really long time and then you come in as a new person, you may be hearing like lots of negativity or you know things that can be really that can really like lessen your drive because you're like I that doesn't sound like I want to work with this person. But if you start with trust, then you can get really far and I've had that happen at other workplaces and have had great luck with just like trusting the people right off the bat and listening to, you know, whatever negative opinions that people have about whatever other department. Transforming justice. Transforming justice doesn't rely on carceral logics to address harm. And this includes punishment, isolation and policing, and it seeks to address the root causes influencing why someone may have caused harm and uses a community accountability process to address this harm. I'm not saying that you have to run a community accountability process because that's a lot of work, but I think that if you use this as like a core framework. For instance, I'm having student authors who I paid $200 each to write about their experiences being black indigenous people of color with intersecting identities at UW Madison. And a couple of students, you know, I had them sign mo use and a couple of students haven't submitted their first drafts, which were do a minute ago, and they did not come to like the peer review session. And so, you know, a punitive response might be like, Why didn't you, you know, send me your essay, when are you going to pay this $200 back, but I don't want to do that. And I really want to you come from a transformative justice space and think about like, Okay, what other things may be going on. You know, communication communicating with them which I have done, but you know doing it some more and seeing if there's a way that I can help to get them to be able to submit their essays for this reader empathy, which just means to be able to share the feelings of another. So, you know, really understanding the challenges that instructors face around we are like, you can definitely get those experiences and use those for like data or reports or things like that. But I think really truly understanding how they feel about those challenges is important as well. Then here is the doing which is the intervening the way of intervening. So these are just a few ideas about what we talked about being applied practically. Using OER to center marginalized voices, whether they be students, faculty, staff or community members, how can you commit to publishing OER that centers marginalized other than silence voices. How can you advocate to bring these voices into the classroom using OER. We know from black feminist thought that intellectual labor is performed outside of academia at the intersection of where theory meets practice. How can your institution connect with community organizations. Now you're being proactive about publishing OER that can be beneficial to the community. In care work, I mentioned the quote where Leah talks about disability justice as beautiful and practical from poetry and dance being as valuable as a blog about access hacks. How do you privilege certain types of knowledge is the written word held in the highest regard despite the deep history of oral storytelling for some indigenous communities. If you want to care look at who is in your open education ecosystem. How do you care for them. Can you support TAs in a fight for a new contract. Do your student authors need groceries delivered. Do they need dinner. Do they need a referral to mental health resources on campus. Not least, does your institution have a program that teaches incarcerated students. How can you help advocate against censorship in prison, especially since this is directly connected to open education and open knowledge. And thinking about how Kaba emphasizes the importance of restoring our awareness of the humanity of prisoners. How might you be able to use OER to humanize incarcerated students and how can you elevate their voices using OER. So this presentation, I just wanted to acknowledge my black women gender studies professors at DePaul University. I don't think any of them are there anymore, but from them I learned black feminism as my foundational feminism I like never learned another one. And I want to thank that we hear community for black indigenous people of color library workers, because we had a community study of maybe like a couple months ago that ended in August. And it was a community study on contemporary abolitionist feminisms and I was a group facilitator for one of the groups. And that was where I've read. Until we free us and a few other books we were beyond survival and Angela Davis is our prisons obsolete. And that is where I started to think more deeply about how abolition concepts can relate to open education. And then I just want to thank queer trans disabled black indigenous and people of color scholars organizers activists and authors whose theory and practice and form my work in open education every day. Thank you. I'll stop sharing. If I can, if I can figure out how to stop. Okay. Thank you Kristen we have about 10 minutes left. So do you want to have some conversation. I think people loved your framework. I know I did. Yay. I'm just now getting to the chat so the slides are up on they were they I put them up like literally five minutes before. So they are up now as a PDF. And if anyone has accessibility issues with them because I'm not sure about how PDFs work from Canva. Let me know, you can like message me on LinkedIn or DM me on Twitter or something, and I'll make sure that an accessible version gets put up. More on the value of patience and resisting urgency. Oh, my Twitter handle is that's my Twitter. Okay, so reflecting more on the value of patience and resisting urgency. So, I think that it's something that I've definitely had to do because like I mentioned I'm a diversity resident so like I have a three year limitation. And so, there was a point where I was like, Oh my God I have to like produce produce produce and get all this stuff out in three years otherwise like have I done what I said I was going to do. In a pandemic hit. I literally started August 2019 I moved to Madison from Chicago in August 2019 and then six months later a pandemic hit. And also in December of 2020 was when I got my ADHD diagnosis which was a very long time coming. And so it really just like I saw a post from an ADHD Instagram account that I followed that was talking about radical acceptance and kind of like, I think that that is like maybe the one of the foundations of patients is like radically accepting like this is how this is right now. It's okay. Maybe I do want to change it, but it's going to take time. And like, then you can actually step back and start thinking more critically about the steps of how you can change it. Instead of, you know, really trying to rush through and like, like, okay, well let's do this right now like we got to get this out by the end of the week it's like, I can't do that it's just not possible, especially with, you know, being chronically ill. It's just going to push you over the edge and you don't you don't need that. What was the draw that brought you from counseling to librarianship. Well, that's such a great question so ever since I was in. So I went to DePaul University, which is the Vincentian school and so one of the first courses we take is like discover or explore class and so I took a class that was about poverty in Chicago, and I learned so so much and I learned about why the school that transferred from had so many resources versus the one I transferred to. And so from then on I decided I wanted to be a school counselor. So I went all the way through undergrad wanting to be a school counselor it was my entire goal, and I started working at my university's library, my sophomore year of college. And I worked there all the way through my master's in school counseling, and I was in my last year of my school counseling degree doing my internship, which was unpaid 30 hours a week during the daytime so I had to work like 25 hours in the evening, just to like make a living. And I was just like the pieces that I'm enjoying about school counseling are much more information oriented like I was really passionate about the information that I was giving to students and like making sure that they had all these resources, and I had a black librarian who was in primary school, currently to be to get her masters as well as her sister, and they were spectrum scholars, and they were like, they kept telling me like you should be a librarian and I was like starting to consider it but, you know, I'm in a master's program this is like a really bad time to want to potentially switch careers. And then I finally decided like, I'm doing this I think I really want this and so I applied for a spectrum scholarship, and I got it. And then I applied for you have I because you have I covers tuition for spectrum scholars in full. And you know I just did a master's so I really did not have the money to do another one. So, I got into you have I and that's how I started my journey as a librarian. Thank you. It's time for probably one more question and there's one more in the chat. And then we need to wrap up at 12 for 25. Thanks. Yeah, so the question is will you speak to how best to invite the participation of people from marginalized groups at a PWI, where those same folks are already constantly called on for things like diversity representation. I, that is one of the main reasons why I applied for a grant from our division of diversity, educational equity educational attainment, and I got it so I got a grant for $5,000, and I paid all of our students $200 to participate. And so I think that if you, I just thought that it was really important because I know that students are often called to do so much work. And so putting out a call for proposals, you know, paying students $200. I felt like that was, you know, a good way to say like you know we value your voice, not just as you know free labor that you perform for the university but like, we really want you to, you know, want to pay you for this. It also had some benefits as far as like there was a writing, there's a narrative writing workshop, and there was a peer review workshop so they can get experienced seeing what like a peer review process was like. So those, there were also some added benefits to that so I think if you're able to, you know, really show that you value their time their intellectual labor. And you can also offer things that are beneficial to them, not just to, you know, you as the open education person then I think that that's a good way to do outreach. But also maybe partner, if you have centers, multicultural centers, you can partner with them and think through some ideas as well. I don't see any more questions in the chat. Thank you all so much for coming. I'm going to stop the recording now if anybody wants to hang around if Professor lambs down which I'm still going to call you professor even though you told me not to. If anybody wants to stick around you guys are welcome to but the recording is stopping now.