Unsettling Knowledge Inequities

In our fifth episode, of “ From Campus to Career: Development Practitioners in Action,” we are in conversation with Rayna Sutherland. Rayna Sutherland (she/her) is a current BCL/JD Candidate at the McGill Faculty of Law. She recently spent four years in Canadian Parliament and the federal government. She began as a Parliamentary Intern working with progressive Members of Parliament across party li...

In our fourth episode, of “ From Campus to Career: Development Practitioners in Action,” we are in conversation with Chris Eaton.   Chris graduated as part of the inaugural cohort of UTSC’s Co-op Program in International Development. His co-op placement was with the Lesotho Chamber of Commerce, where he focused on small business development. With over thirty-five years of experience, he has lived...

In our third episode, of “ From Campus to Career: Development Practitioners in Action,” we are in conversation with Sangita Patel.  Sangita is an experienced international development professional with a career spanning over 20 years, currently serving as the Vice President of Program Management and Compliance and Plan International Canada. Throughout her career, Sangita focused on supporting wome...

In our second episode, of “ From Campus to Career: Development Practitioners in Action,” we are in conversation with Isabelle Kim.  Isabelle is a Senior Policy Advisor of Grants & Contributions Policy and Training at Global Affairs Canada. Over her career, she has worked in Canada, China, and Peru in various civil society organizations, hospitals and universities.  Since joining Global Affairs...

In our first episode, of our new season "From Campus to Career: Development Practitioners in Action," we are in conversation with Aly-Khan Rajani, the current Director for Canada's Indo-Pacific Strategy Regional Coordination and Policy and Planning. Aly-Khan's career is vast, beginning with his International Development Studies co-op with CARE in Zambia to working in humanitari...

In the final episode of our third season, we are joined by Chris Gilliard, a professor and scholar  who is highly regarded for his critiques of surveillance technology, privacy, and the invisible but problematic ways that digital technologies intersect with race, social class and marginalized communities.   In particular, Chris’ work highlights the discriminatory practices that algorithmic decisio...

One of the key themes that intersects across all of our episodes this season is the surveillance and highly extractive and harmful economic practices of big corporations in the academic publishing sector, whose artificial intelligence tools are creating new forms of control and governance over our daily and professional activities. In this episode, we are joined by Christine Cooper, Yves Gendron,...

Over the past 20 years, the academic publishing market has undergone changes that have led us to a juncture where power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of big companies. To help us understand how this came to be and its implications, we are joined today by Claudio Aspesi, a leading market analyst for the academic publishing market. Claudio is a consultant at SPARC , and has authored seve...

Over the last years, as the process of conducting research and scholarship has moved more and more online,  it has become clear that user surveillance and data extraction has crept into academic infrastructure in multiple ways.  For those committed to preserving academic freedom and knowledge equity, it's important to interrogate the practices and structures of the companies that are collecti...

In our third season, we continue our goal of interrogating the politics of knowledge production, exchange and circulation - but with a special focus on exploring the implications of the widespread and often uncritical use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies.  In particular we will examine how the use of these technologies by corporate publishers and data analytics companie...

In the last episode of our second season we are in conversation with two early career researchers and activists - Denisse Albornoz  and Antoinette Foster. They reflect on how the values of openness, equity, safety, accountability and much more have influenced and informed their work and career trajectories both in academia and beyond.

In November 2020, the world’s first Virtual Indigenous Circle on Open Science and the Decolonization of Knowledge took place.  The Circle format was designed by Dr Lorna Wanósts’a7 Williams and featured nearly 20 Indigenous speakers from around the world.    They came together to inform UNESCO’s recommendation on Open Science and ensure that Indigenous knowledge and perspectives would be incorpora...

Twenty years ago the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) released a statement of strategy and commitment to advocating for and realizing open access infrastructures across diverse institutions around the world.  In this episode we have the opportunity to hear from four individuals who have been part of that journey and work since the beginning: Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at Open S...

In this episode we speak with Rajesh Tandon, founder of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) based in New Delhi, India, and Budd Hall, Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria in Canada. Budd and Rajesh jointly hold a UNESCO Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education . They reflect on coining the concept of "knowledge democracy&quo...

In our second season, we continue our mission of interrogating the politics of knowledge production, exchange and circulation - but with a specific focus on open science and open access. In this first episode we speak with Eleanor Haine, Program Officer at the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and Fernanda Beigel, Chair of the UNESCO Open Science Advisory Committee and Researcher at CONICET . Both ha...

In the final episode of our first season, we are in conversation with artist Jasmeen Patheja . Jasmeen is the founder of BlankNoise -  a multi city / multi country collective that has been instrumental in building public discourse and shifting conciseness on sexual violence in public spaces. 

In our fourth episode we are in conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a technologist, transmedia artist and activist. Thenmozhi is the Executive Director of Equality Labs , a South Asian power-building organization that uses community research, political base-building, culture-shifting art, and digital security to end the oppression of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and relig...

In our third episode we are in conversation with  Dr. James Tumwine, Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health who recently retired from the School of Medicine, College of Health Sciences in Makerere University at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. Professor Tumwine is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of African Health Sciences , an open access, free, internationally refereed, multidisciplina...

In our second episode we are in conversation with Dr. Lorna Wánosts’a7 Williams, one of the leading Indigenous woman educators and scholars in Canada who has long championed decolonial education, the centering of Indigenous knowledge systems and the revitalization of Indigenous languages.  ( This is the  link to Lilwat principles of teaching learning website.) 

In our first episode we speak with Leslie Chan from the Knowledge Equity Lab , Nick Shockey from SPARC , as well as 3 younger generation members of the Lab : Kanishka Sikri, Blessing Timidi Digha, and Denisse Albornoz. They reflect on what knowledge equity means to them, how and why they are committed to working on realizing it through systems change, what that might look like, knowledge translati...