Janneke Adema's chapter on challenges of, and experiments in radical openness (defined by her as "practices and theories of radical open access are critical of openness in its neoliberal guises, but still try to engage with the open in an affirmative way too” p. 5) can offer several interventions for archive ethnography, and I offer a few of those here in the form of questions:
(1) What is the political economy of knowledge production for archive ethnography?
Since the book's departure is a push against the commodification of the book and the neoliberalism of the university (both circulates empty signifiers that reproduce sameness), both projects in which ethnographers are emplaced in, what conditions make archive ethnography possible? The author notes the issue of cost and volunteer labor, for example, that can look very different depending on what model of openness is under question: “Many scholar-led and not-for-profit projects therefore try to redirect this volunteer labor where possible toward more progressive forms of publishing—for example, by shifting it away from commercial, profit-driven publishers and gifting it to developing, not-for-profit, open access projects instead, as Mattering Press is doing.” (39) Since ethnographic fieldwork and archiving involves a lot of volunteer labor, getting at what is at stake for archive ethnography within this political economy, would be helpful.
(2) What publics (following last week's article on civic community archiving that cites Dewey's call to provoke publics into existence) do radical openness and experimentation provoke into existence?
I am thinking about the concept of "hyperpolitics" cited in this chapter: “hyperpolitics “names a refusal to consider the question of politics as closed or decided in advance, and a concomitant willingness to open up an unconditional space for thinking about politics and the political ‘beyond’ the way in which they have been conventionally conceived—a thinking of politics which is more than politics, while still being political” (p. 22). The closure of political space is very real and frightening, but is all closure necessarily bad? Is there a way to think about closure and gatekeeping as a public good, that too, provoke publics into existence? How could archive ethnography hold space for both openness and closure?
(3) What goes into making radical openness and experimentation sustainable, and is that a necessary goal?
When reading about experiments in radical openness, I was curious to know what happened to earlier experiments mentioned in the book but those that are not updated anymore? Considering that most experiments are scholar-led, what happens when those scholars are no longer in the picture for various reasons? I am thinking about the question of preservation (and reanalysis) in a decentralized way: how can archive ethnography support a broad community of practitioners?
