Sarah-Anne Arsenault is a doctoral student in musicology at Université Laval (Québec, Canada). Her master’s thesis explored the process of co-creating a song with teenagers. In her doctoral project, funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) graduate fellowship, she examines the listening, creative, and collaborative practices of university music students, adopting a critical perspective on traditional music studies. Her work is deeply informed by the ideas and epistemological principles developed by the late professor Florence Piron (Université Laval), who was also her mother. Beyond her academic research, Sarah-Anne is an active composer for theatre and musical theatre in Québec City, as well as a choral conductor and vocal director.
Élisabeth Arsenault holds a multidisciplinary bachelor’s degree in history and anthropology and a master’s degree in anthropology from Université Laval (Québec, Canada). She is currently pursuing a doctorate in applied human sciences at Université de Montréal. Her research builds on the work she conducted during her her master’s degree. It focuses on forced internal migration in Central Africa, expanding it to examine the effects of climate change and the role of internally displaced people’s knowledge in shaping adaptation policies. Alongside her doctoral studies, she works as an editor at Éditions science et bien commun, a publishing house dedicated to open science in both the Global North and South. She has also contributed to various research projects—both in Québec and internationally—focusing on health, social justice, cognitive justice, education, and migration, often through collaborative action research. Her approach is shaped by decolonial and intersectional perspectives, with a strong commitment to co-constructing and valuing diverse forms of knowledge, particularly through the life story method.
Lucy Barnes is Senior Editor and Outreach Coordinator at Open Book Publishers, a leading non-profit, scholar-led open access book publisher based in Cambridge, UK. She also works on outreach for the Copim Open Book Futures project and is on the board of the ScholarLed collective. She coordinates the Open Access Books Network (oabooksnetwork.org) in collaboration with OAPEN, OPERAS, and SPARC Europe, and she is on the Editorial Advisory Board for the OAPEN Open Access Books Toolkit. You can find her on Bluesky @alittleroad.bsky.social.
Simon Batterbury has edited the volunteer-run, Diamond OA Journal of Political Ecology since 2003, produced with Janeway and formerly Open Journal Systems (OJS). When not doing that, he is Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and active in a range of environmental projects in Oceania (particularly Indigenous rights in New Caledonia-Kanaky) and Europe (effects of the rush for Critical Raw Materials for energy transitions). He helps to run Melbourne’s community-led, open access bike workshop, WeCycle, which refurbished bikes for people in need. He writes about those workshops too, most recently from Lancaster University where he held a British Academy fellowship in 2024. http://www.simonbatterbury.net
Marc Herbst is an arts-based researcher, publisher and cultural organizer who currently teaches performance at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. He co-founded the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest in 2001 in Los Angeles, and continues its co-publication as a testament to memory and continuity: that cultural and political narratives can take their own time. Aesthetics & Protest publishes its eponymous journal and collaborates with other editorial projects including their recent Promiscuous Infrastructures book (2024) with the Promiscuous Care Working Group. He is writing a book on the relationship between national power grids and individual night time dreams that relates to how we think about abstract and strangely distributed information.
Dr Angela Okune has studied and worked on open science and knowledge infrastructures for the last fifteen years, focusing on global inequities in science and technology. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from UC Irvine and explores ways to resource underrecognized communities through locally-led participatory processes. Angela has received research fellowships from the NSF, Fulbright, Wenner-Gren, and University of California Berkeley and has published 25+ peer-reviewed works in Science & Technology Studies. Angela co-founded the research department at Nairobi’s first tech innovation hub, coordinated the Open and Collaborative Science in Development Network, and co-edited Contextualizing Openness (University of Ottawa Press). She advises the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE) and other Open Access publishing platforms, is an Associate Editor for the Open Access journal Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, and founded Research Data Share, an experimental open ethnographic data portal.
Charmaine Pereira is an independent feminist scholar living and working in Abuja, Nigeria. Her research and writing address the gender and sexual politics of violence, feminist thought and practice, and the politics of natural resource extraction in Africa. Pereira is the author of Gender in the Making of the Nigerian University System (James Currey/Partnership for Higher Education in Africa, 2007), editor of Changing Narratives of Sexuality: Contestations, Compliance and Women’s Empowerment (Zed, 2014), and co-editor of Jacketed Women: Qualitative Research Methodologies on Sexualities and Gender in Africa (UCT Press and United Nations University Press, 2013). As the former co-ordinator of the Initiative for Women’s Studies in Nigeria, she has organised and co-ordinated action research on the theme of sexual harassment and sexual violence in Nigerian universities with a view to working on strategies for change. She has been an active force in the coalition pushing for the passage of the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act, 2015 in Nigeria and has coordinated research on implementation of the law. She is one of the seven editors of Feminist Africa (FA).
Jeff Pooley is a lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania (USA). He also co-directs mediastudies.press, a nonprofit open access publisher in communication and media studies.
Ela Przybyło is Associate Professor and Graduate Director in English and Core Faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Illinois State University. She is the author and editor of several books including Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality (Ohio State University Press 2019) and Ungendering Menstruation (University of Minnesota Press, May 2015), On the Politics of Ugliness (Palgrave 2018) and, with Yo-Ling Chen, Global Asexualities and Aromanticisms (in progress). Ela is a founding editor of the peer-reviewed, open access journal Feral Feminisms.
Magalí Rabasa is associate professor of Hispanic Studies and Director of Ethnic Studies at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon, USA. She received her PhD in Cultural Studies with an emphasis in Feminist Theory and Research from the University of California, Davis. She is co-editor of Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid in the Covid-19 Crisis (Pluto Press, 2020) and Somos una imagen del futuro (Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2019). Her first book, The Book in Movement: Autonomous Politics and the Lettered City Underground (Pittsburgh UP, 2019; and in translation: Tren en Movimiento Ediciones/Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2021; Bajo Tierra Ediciones, 2022; Kikuyo Editorial, 2023) is an exploration of print book culture in contemporary Latin American social movements. She is currently working on a new project examining feminist economies of knowledge in the Americas.
Ashwani Sharma is an independent lecturer, researcher and writer. He is the founding co-editor of the online journal darkmatter. He taught film, media and cultural studies at London College of Communication (LCC), University of the Arts London (UAL), and the University of East London. He is a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, and associate of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), and Sonic Screen Lab, UAL. He is on the editorial action group for the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies. His research interests include race and urban screen culture, postcolonial aesthetics and history, blackness and cultural studies, South Asian diasporic culture, music and contemporary art, study and experimental pedagogy, and open access publishing. He is currently writing a book on racial capitalism, globalisation, and visual culture, and is the co-editor of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. He is a published poet. You can reach him at a.sharma@fastmail.net @ashdisorient.bsky.social https://substack.com/@ashwanisharma1
Dr Lauren Smith (she/her) is Senior Liaison Librarian at Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, where she leads the team of liaison librarians and supports academic colleagues and students in the division of Media, Communication and Performing Arts. She is also one of QMU UCU’s Equalities Reps. Lauren is interested in how libraries and library workers can use critical pedagogy, radical and inclusive practice to support the creation of conditions to enable social justice. She is a section editor of the Journal of Radical Librarianship and was involved in the Radical Librarians Collective.
As a semiotician, Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei has dedicated himself to the investigation of systems of sense making and signification. He has received formal training in linguistics, multimedia art, philosophy, and group-analytic psychotherapy. Van Gerven Oei is currently director/CFO of open access publishing house punctum books and founding director/CEO of software company Thoth Open Metadata.