Open education is built upon values of collaboration, inclusivity, equity, and accessibility, yet these same values are not consistently reflected in the hiring, management, and support of OER practitioners. Specifically, librarianship, a field that is feminized but not feminist, espouses values of democracy and access while perpetuating oppressive systems. In this presentation, we discuss how feminist theory offers an avenue for exploring this dissonance, with a focus on the conceptualization of power and that impact on OER labor. Recognizing librarianship’s and feminism’s historic privileging of cisgendered, white, middle-class women, we adopt Crenshaw’s (1989) framework of intersectionality to explicitly address structural marginalization and oppression in the field. Following this brief presentation, we invite participants to join us in reimagining how power might be shared among OER creators, collaborators, and consumers to foster more equitable labor conditions. In breakout rooms, participants will critique the applicability of feminist theory to OER labor, offer suggestions for alternative theoretical frameworks, and co-develop action items to aid in translating theory to practice.
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of the session, participants will be able to…
1.) Apply tenets of feminist theory to a discussion of power imbalances in OER labor
2.) Critique the applicability of feminist theory to power imbalances in OER labor
3). Collaboratively develop action items for applying theory to practice in combating power imbalances in their own professional contexts
Slides:
https://bit.ly/OERLaborSlides & Resource Document:
https://bit.ly/OERLaborResources
