Browsing by Subject "access to knowledge"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Access to learning resources in Post-apartheid South Africa
    (Massachusetts Institute of Technology & International Development Research Centre, 2018-05-01) Gray, Eve; Czerniewicz, Laura; Joe Karaganis
    Any inquiry into how university students get the learning resources they need for their education in post-apartheid South Africa must deal with three interrelated subjects: the legacy of apartheid, which continues to structure educational opportunities in important ways more than twenty years after the first democratic election; the organization and increasingly radical transformation of the commercial publishing market, which has been the primary source of textbooks and other materials in the system; and— common to all of the chapters in this book—the mix of new-technology-enabled strategies through which students do their best to get the textbooks and other materials they need. We track three decades of tensions around these issues, as post-apartheid leaders struggle to reform an educational system originally designed primarily to control and oppress rather than educate the majority population. Because the old system had grown up around numerous (and often colonially grounded) accommodations of the global publishing business, international copyright law, and—most important—a structural disregard for whether the system worked in more than a minimal sense, the pressure for reform has produced tensions on all of these fronts.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Open Access
    Confronting inequitable power dynamics of global knowledge production and exchange : feature-opinion
    (Water Research Commission, 2015) Czerniewicz, Laura
    The research environment in the global South faces many pressing challenges given resource inequality. Technical and financial issues aside, Laura Czerniewicz asserts it is the values and practices shaped by the Northern research agenda which contribute just as much to the imbalance. In order to confront these inequities, perceptions of “science” and research outputs must be broadened, and the open access movement needs to also broaden its focus from access to knowledge to full participation in knowledge creation and in scholarly communication.