Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse

Abstract

This article explores potential strategies for reuse that acknowledge the tensions and overlaps between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices, and prevailing principles of openness, as we find them in Free Culture and current dominant approaches to Open Access publishing. Invested in collective cultural production, we are looking for decolonial feminist practices of reuse that pay attention to potential power asymmetries that play out when one engages with existing materials, contents, or knowledges. First, we map a series of proposals for making conditions for reuse explicit. Starting with experimental Open Content Licences, which attempt to regulate reuse through setting conditions, we then discuss a range of manifestos, guiding principles, and protocols developed mostly in the context of Indigenous knowledge practices. These documents articulate values and agreements and thereby function as toolkits to experiment with more equitable approaches to knowledge sharing. We read these approaches together with ‘Collective Conditions for Reuse’ (CC4r), a proposition that attempts to address some of the issues with universalist principles of Open Access and Free Culture frameworks. In the last part of this article, we call for decolonial feminist practices of reuse: By insisting that 'first times do not exist' (Rivera Garza, 2020: 53), such practices reject a concept of originality that claims to be first on the scene, an assertion that we will describe later as a violent settler colonial claim. What is more? Committing to decolonial feminist practices of reuse is also an attempt to make space for discomfort by acknowledging that the needs of different reusers might not align. By decentring the modernist concept of the author as a self-determined subject, decolonial feminist practices of reuse recognise authorial practice as a reciprocal and relational act of touching and being touched – of reusing and being reused.