Anxiety in the Archives:
A Podcast Dissertation About Knowledge Control and Dissemination in Academia
by Elizabeth D. Headrick
Librarian | PhD Candidate | Podcaster | Writer
“The open-access movement is really about anti-corporatism. OA advocates want to make collective everything and eliminate private business, except for small businesses owned by the disadvantaged.” — Jeffrey Beall, “The Open-Access Movement is Not Really about Open Access,” 2013
When I started library school in 2017 I believed that I wanted to be a public librarian. Shortly after I started classes I was hired at the TWU Blagg-Huey Library as a graduate research assistant, where I began to learn about academic libraries and concepts like Open Access and open educational resources. It was at this point that I changed my track to academic libraries. I saw what they could be and what they were struggling with and I wanted to be involved.
I believed then, and I still believe now—as a PhD candidate in Rhetoric—that Open Access is a program that has great potential; it has the means to create a more equitable world of scholarly communication and this is something that I wholeheartedly support. The voices of dissent are very loud but support for Open Access is there. It just needs voices that are louder than the opposition.
And what better way to be loud than with a podcast? While podcast dissertations may be rare, they aren’t unheard of and I believe that this is the most effective way to speak the truth about the rhetoric that surrounds knowledge control and dissemination in academia.
Who has the knowledge and who is being denied the information they seek?
Who is manning the gates of the Ivory Tower and how will they respond when those gates are finally blasted apart?
We have work to do, y’all, and we need to get going.
