Pour télécharger le PDF (version intégrale à 94 Mo ou allégée à 8 Mo), cliquez ici.
À la demande des responsables, aucune version imprimée n’est prévue pour ce livre.
L’idée du livre liquide (Liquid Book) est de proposer des livres d’un nouveau genre : nés de textes moissonnés sur des carnets de recherche et des blogs, ils présentent des modes d’écriture native du web, hypertextuelle, augmentée et multimédiatique. Comme les blogs, les ouvrages permettent de naviguer de fenêtre en fenêtre, de regarder tout en lisant, de lire tout en écoutant. Comme les blogs, ils font entendre plusieurs voix, celles des auteur.e.s des billets devenus textes, mais aussi celle des commentateur.trice.s qui ont augmenté l’écriture initiale en la rendant interactive.
En lien direct avec le contexte d’une mise en valeur de la recherche en ligne en sciences humaines et sociales sur la plateforme Hypothèses, ce livre liquide propose des textes soigneusement sélectionnés dans les contenus du carnet de recherche Les Espaces réflexifs, et éditorialisés de manière à constituer un livre fluide, ouvert aux commentaires et augmenté, notamment par les liens hypertextes et la circulation qu’ils permettent.
Liquide, cela veut dire multiple dans les formes d’expression (texte, hypertexte, image, son), polyphonique dans la nature de l’écriture (l’augmentation par les commentaires) et évolutif dans les contenus de la recherche. Un livre liquide accueille la variété des approches, des écritures et des langues. Il a l’ambition de photographier l’état de la science en ligne à un moment donné de sa diffusion, en la rendant accessible par l’éditorialisation et le partage.
We're celebrating the beginning of 2020 with fantastic news about the start of the COPIM project, our new and forthcoming titles and a warm welcome to all the libraries that have decided to support our OA initiative. Check out our blog post about the problems with COUNTER metrics for OA books, as well as an interview with our hardworking Production Manager Luca Baffa, who turns the author's manuscript into a book (in multiple formats)!
There’s lots to explore below, so dive in to find out more about our plans for this year...
COUNTER Metrics: An Unsatisfactory Measurement of a University's Usage of Open Access Books: 'The COUNTER data libraries get for OA content and the COUNTER data they get for closed-access content are not directly comparable, and there is a risk that the OA resources are seen as less popular with users simply because those users are not being efficiently funnelled by a paywall.'
Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint: In December, we announced our intention to reduce our carbon footprint in 2020. This post includes more detail about our plans and an update about what we’ve achieved thus far.
2020 opened with the publication of The Waning Sword: Conversion Imagery and Celestial Myth in 'Beowulf', in which Edward Pettit investigates the nature and significance of the image of the giant melting sword that stands at the structural and thematic heart of this Old English poem. As Pettit highlights in his introduction, this book 'swims against the tide of modern academic literary studies' and aims to provide a more interdisciplinary approach to the poem's major episodes and themes.
Also newly published is Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research, a fascinating collection that addresses themes such as the changing nature of scholarly publishing in a digital age, the different kinds of ‘gate-keepers’ for scholarship, and the difficulties of effectively assessing the impact of digital resources. This timely volume illuminates the different forces underlying the shifting practices in humanities research today, with especial focus on how humanists take ownership of, and are empowered by, technology in unexpected ways.
On 10 January 2020, the first meeting of the COPIM project took place in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures at Coventry University. This was the first opportunity for all members of this international partnership to meet and discuss their core objectives and immediate plans, before zooming out to an overview of the project as a whole. You can read more about the key points discussed, the objectives, and the outcome of this meeting at https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/kickoff. You can also follow the COPIM project's official Twitter for more information.
We are really excited about what the future holds and we will keep you posted with future developments!
Ignasi Ribó, author of our latest OA textbook Prose Fiction: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Narrative, has joined us for an interview in which he explains the idea behind the book and gives more insight of this fantastic project he embarked upon. Ignasi has been teaching Literary Theory and Semiotics at university level for more than ten years and currently works as a Lecturer in the School of Liberal Arts at Mae Fah Luang University (Chiang Rai, Thailand). He is the author of books and articles, including several novels, as well as academic essays on literary theory, comparative literature, ecocriticism, biosemiotics, cultural ecology, and environmental philosophy.
Last December we announced our decision to shrink our carbon footprint and to aim at reducing environmental impact. Lucy Barnes, our Editor and Outreach Coordinator, has written a new blog post in which she talks about the steps we have already taken as a company.
This year we will also be releasing three innovative titles within the field of environmental studies: essential reading for everyone seeking a deeper understanding of the state of our planet and the role we have in shaping it.
Living Earth Community: Multiple Ways of Being and Knowing, edited by Sam Mickey, Mary Evelyn Tucker, and John Grim. This book will examine the interplay between Nature and Culture in the setting of our current age of ecological crisis, stressing the importance of addressing these ecological crises occurring around the planet through multiple perspectives.
Earth 2020: An Insider’s Guide to a Rapidly Changing Planet, edited by Philippe D. Tortell. Written by world-leading thinkers on the frontlines of global change research and policy, this multi-disciplinary collection maintains a dual focus: some essays investigate specific facets of the physical Earth system, while others explore the social, legal and political dimensions shaping the human environmental footprint. In doing so, the essays collectively highlight the urgent need for collaboration across diverse domains of expertise in addressing one of the most significant challenges facing us today.
What Works in Conservation 2020, edited by William J. Sutherland, Lynn V. Dicks, Silviu O. Petrovan and Rebecca K. Smith: The 2020 edition will contain new material and will aim at covering practical aspects of global conservation. As with previous editions, it will also contain as key results from the summarized evidence for each conservation intervention and an assessment of the effectiveness of each by international expert panels.
As with all our books, these titles will be freely available to read and download in our website upon publication. Grab and/or download your copy and join us in our quest towards a better planet!
We would like to welcome the new universities that have joined our membership scheme during the first months of 2020:
University of Graz - Austria University of Gothenburg - Sweden The University of Adelaide - Australia Jyväskylä University - Finland Tilburg University - Netherlands University of Arizona - United States McMaster University - Canada TU Berlin - Germany Canterbury Christ Church University - England Rollins College - United States Harvard University - United States Open Universiteit Nederlands - The Netherlands University of Kentucky - United States The University of British Columbia - Canada
Thank you so much for your support!
If you'd like to find out more about the benefits of membership for staff & students, visit http://bit.ly/2mXOfJY
Luca Baffa received an MLitt in Publishing Studies in 2013 from the University of Stirling. He is responsible for producing the various editions of our titles, including typesetting and generating the files for print and digital editions.
What drew you to work at OBP?
There is something fascinating (and at times revelatory) in the internal debate we go through before we take a decision that would affect us in the long term. 'What is it that I am looking for', 'what is in there for me' and 'how do these two things relate to each other'. For OBP this process was a particularly interesting! Since first contact, I had the feeling that:
The result of the work did not look trivial and it mattered to people;
Learn something new every day - the bar looked fairly high, and the only way to cope with it seemed to be learning and getting better every day;
Colleagues and clients - the people who I would be working with come from all sort of backgrounds! Interesting insights both within and outside the job were guaranteed. So! I decided to file my job application.
What interests you about OA publishing?
I was always drawn by the 'sharing' component of OA, specifically as it unleash potential to get and build upon contents. This has very interesting implications for production! Content is treated as data, and it can be accessed and used for all sort of aims (from text analysis to publication).
Why did you choose production as your career path?
It was a very unconscious decision (then maybe not a decision at all!).
I had a fantastic lecturer for my Book Design class, the type that keeps the class engaged offering real case examples and drops here and there names of books to check out at the library. This was the beginning of a long process which involved many more books, many more people I learned from, workshops, projects... and this is how I got into production.
What has been the more challenging yet interesting book that you had to work on?
Most definitely my first professional project. It was a quarterly anthology of fiction, for which I took care of the book and promotional material production. It was a bit like when you are eighteen and you borrow father's car: you know what to do, you have never really done it before and there is a whole exciting world in front of you to explore.
What would you say to people interested in a future in production?
Talk to people.
Books and classes can get you started, but real understanding of the process and practices comes from the people you work with. I know that printing online can be cheaper and faster (heck!), but the kind of insights you get when you pop in a print shop, take a good look at the machines and talk to the print personnel is invaluable (and fun!).
Pour commander le livre en version imprimée au Québec, en France ou en Afrique, cliquez sur le bouton Paypal ci-dessous.
Acheter un livre, c’est nous soutenir et permettre à ceux et celles qui ne peuvent l’acheter de le lire en libre accès.
Comment lire et comprendre les pratiques culturelles africaines? Comment mobiliser les savoirs sur l’Afrique, ses arts et ses cultures sans verser dans la réification ou le folklorisme? Profondément novateur, cet ouvrage collectif mobilise les outils théoriques des cultural studies pour proposer un généreux panorama de l’étude de la culture en Afrique. Il rassemble des textes d’auteurs et d’autrices d’Afrique de l’Ouest, théoriques ou descriptifs, qui mettent en lumière la réévaluation passionnante des modes d’appréhension des pratiques et objets en contexte africain que proposent les études culturelles africaines. L’épilogue qui clôt le livre n’est donc point fermeture, mais plutôt ouverture sur les enjeux relatifs à ce nouveau champ d’études, plein de promesses pour rendre compte de l’extraordinaire créativité des cultures africaines.
ISBN ePub : 978-2-924661-82-6
ISBN pour l’impression : 978-2-924661-81-9
231 pages
Date de publication : juin 2019
DOI : 10.5281/zenodo.3470395
Utilisez le bouton Paypal ci-dessous pour commander le livre imprimé au Canada ou en Europeou l’obtenir en format ePub (prêtable). Le livre est disponible dans nos librairies dépositaires : la Librairie du Quartier à Québec, Zone libre à Montréal, à venir pour Paris, Genève et l’Afrique.
Table des matières
Table des matières
Introduction. Regards pluriels sur les cultures africaines comme lieux de savoirs
Isaac Bazié et Salaka Sanou
Le recyclage : un paradigme des études culturelles africaines
Philip Amangoua Atcha
Littérature-monde ou littérature-mode? Éloge du copiage chez Sami Tchak et Alain Mabanckou
Adama Coulibaly
La critique africaine : de l’autorégulation à la systématisation
Kaoum Boulama
Sociologie des petits récits. Essai sur « les écritures de la rue » en contexte africain
David Koffi N’Goran
Littératures africaines et lecture comme médiation. Réflexions sur l’appréhension des cultures africaines à partir des violences collectives dans le roman francophone
Isaac Bazié
Pour une taxinomie des genres littéraires bààtɔnù
Gniré Tatiana Dafia
Le mariage polygamique dans les arts en Afrique. La polyandrie comme parodie de la polygynie dans deux œuvres africaines
Aïssata Soumana Kindo
Masques, alliances et parentés à plaisanterie au Burkina 173 Faso : le jeu verbal et non verbal
Alain Joseph Sissao
Épilogue. D’hier à demain, les études culturelles africaines
Salaka Sanou
***
Pour acheter le livre, choisissez le tarif en fonction de l’endroit où le livre devra être expédié. Des frais de 15 $ sont ajoutés pour le transport. Le ePub (pour lire sur une tablette ou un téléphone) revient à 16 $ et est expédié par courriel.
Comment le protestantisme s’est-il développé en Haïti? Quelle est la contribution du protestantisme à l’histoire et à la société haïtienne? Comment se situent les églises réformées face aux enjeux de la sécularisation et de la mondialisation? Aborder ces questions sans complaisance est essentiel pour l’avenir du protestantisme en Haïti et c’est ce que propose ce livre issu du colloque du Bicentenaire du protestantisme organisé par l’Institut universitaire de Formation des Cadres (INUFOCAD) du 15 au 17 août 2016 à Port-au-Prince, sous les auspices de la Fédération protestante d’Haïti.
Illustration de couverture : design de Djossè Roméo Tessy, photographie d’Anderson Pierre
Le livre est aussi disponible à la Librairie du Quartier, 1120, avenue Cartier, Québec G1R 2S5 (418) 990-0330 et à la librairie ZONE de l’Université Laval (https://www.zone.coop/) (418) 656-2600.
Pour le commander en ligne (des frais de port de 9 $ s’ajouteront) :
Portraits de femmes engagées dans la préservation de l’environnement
Auteurs : Collectif d’écriture sous la direction de Florence Piron
Collection Portraits de femme
Date de parution : décembre 2015
Résumé :
Comment s’engager dans des actions en faveur de la vie et du bien commun en cette période marquée par des problèmes d’envergure planétaire tels que le réchauffement climatique, la pollution accrue, l’acidification des océans ou les menaces sur la biodiversité? Des gouvernements tentent tant bien que mal de s’entendre pour agir. Mais des citoyennes ne les ont pas attendus pour s’engager avec passion et détermination dans la préservation de notre milieu de vie collectif et de ses ressources naturelles. Du Tchad à la Russie, du Québec au Kenya, de la France aux États-Unis, des centaines de femmes ont organisé, dénoncé, mobilisé, critiqué, documenté, afin que l’humanité prenne conscience de la fragilité de son habitat et de la nécessité d’en prendre soin.
Politiciennes, scientifiques, avocates, enseignantes, mais aussi designer, mère de famille, secrétaire, etc., les femmes présentées dans ce livre ont en commun le sentiment qu’en tant que citoyennes de la Terre, elles doivent agir pour préserver leur planète, au nom du bien commun. Lire le récit de leur vie, c’est s’imprégner de leur énergie, s’inspirer de leurs luttes et goûter à leur conviction. Une lecture salutaire!
Les 44 portraits qui composent ce livre ont été rédigés en grande partie par des étudiants et étudiantes de maîtrise en communication publique de l’Université Laval.
Entrevue radio sur ce livre, émission Le 8e continent, CKRL, 7 janvier 2016, avec Florence Piron et Nathalie Bissonnette
Disponible en html (libre accès), en pdf, en Epub et en livre imprimé. 400 pages.
Pour commander le livre imprimé (25 $ CAD + livraison) ou sur support pdf ou Epub : (8 $ CAD), cliquez-ci dessous.
Vous pouvez aussi envoyer un chèque du montant approprié à l’ordre de l’Association science et bien commun, 1085 avenue De Bourlamaque Québec QC G1R 2P4 Canada, en précisant bien le nombre souhaité de copies et l’adresse d’expédition.
Issu du livre Du soleil pour tous. L’énergie solaire au Sénégal : un droit, des droits, une histoire (2018), cet ouvrage est un hommage au travail du professeur Abdou Moumouni Dioffo, dont la portée et le caractère précurseur sont plus sensibles que jamais. Promouvoir les usages multiformes et le développement immédiat de l’énergie solaire en Afrique, perfectionner les procédés de conversion et les matériels, défendre la priorité des investissements de recherche et de formation : tels furent les trois grands axes de l’action pionnière du physicien nigérien Abdou Moumouni Dioffo, premier grand spécialiste internationalement reconnu de l’énergie solaire issu du continent le plus ensoleillé de la planète.
Ce livre contient :
une réédition des deux articles d’Abdou Moumouni Dioffo « L’énergie solaire dans les pays africains » (1964) et « L’éducation scientifique et technique dans ses rapports avec le développement en Afrique » (1969).
une reprise de deux textes d’Albert-Michel Wright, ingénieur héliotechnicien et ancien collaborateur d’Abdou Moumouni Dioffo qui fut son successeur à la direction de l’Office Nigérien de l’Énergie Solaire (ONERSOL).
un portfolio d’une trentaine de photographies inédites de Marc Jacquet-Pierroulet, ancien Volontaire Français du Progrès au laboratoire d’Abdou Moumouni Dioffo à Niamey de 1970 à 1972.
un texte de Salamatou Doudou sur la vie d’Abdou Moumouni Dioffo.
Puissent les jeunes d’Afrique et d’ailleurs être nombreux à suivre son exemple !
Illustration de couverture : design de Kate McDonnell, pour la collection Mémoires des Suds
Sous la direction de Sivane Hirsch et Audrey Groleau, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières
Pour accéder au livre en version html, cliquez ici.
Pour télécharger le PDF sur Zenodo : à venir
Pour commander le livre en version imprimée, cliquez sur le bouton Paypal tout en bas de la page.
Acheter un livre, c’est nous soutenir et permettre à ceux et celles qui ne peuvent l’acheter de le lire en libre accès.
Comment enseigner les objets complexes en classe? Utiliser l’interdisciplinarité permettrait de les aborder de façon globale et approfondie en faisant dialoguer une pluralité de points de vue et d’expertises à leur sujet. Mais comment faire? Quelle approche pédagogique choisir pour réaliser l’interdisciplinarité en classe? Cet ouvrage collectif, né d’un cours de didactique à l’Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, présente plusieurs approches novatrices, du préscolaire à l’université et dans diverses disciplines. Les chapitres décrivent les défis à la fois pratiques et épistémologiques associés à chaque approche, dans l’espoir d’encourager les enseignants et les enseignantes à les adopter avec enthousiasme.
ISBN version imprimée : 978-2-924661-35-2
ISBN ePub : 978-2-924661-36-9
DOI :
139 pages
Couverture réalisée par Kate McDonnell, illustration de etiamos@123rf
Date de publication : décembre 2019
1. Enseigner la consommation responsable en milieu scolaire… et pourquoi pas?
2. Les légendes, l’apprentissage d’une langue étrangère et l’interdisciplinarité
3. Favoriser l’interdisciplinarité et l’abord d’objets complexes en classe par une approche subjective de la spectature
4. L’approche par problème, une porte ouverte à l’interdisciplinarité
5. L’approche culturelle de l’enseignement : une passerelle entre culture et interdisciplinarité
6. La littérature jeunesse, porte d’entrée de l’interdisciplinarité
7. Conceptualiser un objet scolaire interdisciplinaire grâce à la controverse constructive
8. Entre image et interdisciplinarité : l’analyse iconographique comme approche pédagogique interdisciplinaire
9. Les protocoles de verbalisation interdisciplinaires en traduction
10. La dissection interdisciplinaire
11. Enseigner l’histoire de l’Holocauste
12. L’approche par compétences en classe d’histoire et l’enseignement de l’intégration nationale au Cameroun : une approche novatrice
13. Quand l’interdisciplinarité s’invite dans l’enseignement non formel
14. Guide de soutien aux enseignantes et enseignants de l’éducation préscolaire
À propos de la maison d’édition
Pour acheter le livre, choisissez le tarif en fonction de l’endroit où le livre devra être expédié. Des frais de 15 $ sont ajoutés pour le transport. Le ePub (pour lire sur une tablette ou un téléphone) revient à 16 $ et est expédié par courriel.
In 2015 a video of a child in an Internet café in the Philippines began to trend on social media sites. Titled,Kanta ng isang Anak para sa kanyang inang OFW “Blank Space“ (“Song of a child for her overseas foreign worker mother”), the video shows a girl singing via Skype to her mother who is working in an unnamed location, presumably outside of the Philippines. “Ma kakantahan ulit kita ha?” (I’ll sing for you again mom), she says, and starts singing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space”.Her mother attentively watches and listens to her song,soon beginning to cry in longing for a daughter she has not seen in a long time. The girl’s attention is divided between the screen that shows the lyrics, the camera that films her singing, and her mother who quietly observes. This video has over 110,000 views and is one of many archived messages from a child singing or speaking to their mother who labours transnationally. Despite the videos’ jittery framing and low quality, the intended message of shared longing across cyber and transnational borders is clear.
The Spanish-American war (1899-1902) resulted in the relinquishment of the colony of the Philippines from Spain to the United States. This transfer of power instituted the imperial specter that continues to grip the archipelago. The many performances of American pop music on Youtube and on stages throughout the Philippines are what Christine Bacareza Balance calls the “musical aftermath of US imperial cultures” (2016). Having amassed over 97 million YouTube views in the Philippines, Taylor Swift’s overwhelming popularity is evidence of this continued imperial presence. In the video, the young Filipinx girl sings lyrics written by Swift: “I’m dying to see how this one ends. Grab your passport and my hand.” When sung by this child these lyrics take on different meaning than Swift likely intended. Perhaps she is anticipating an end to the necessity of separation between mother and daughter.
Using song, the video provides evidence of what Hannah Dyer calls the ‘asymmetries of childhood innocence’ (2019), reminding its audience of the ways transnational labour and global capital impact children’s experiences of kinship and development. Dyer suggests that some children are withheld the protective hold of childhood innocence. She writes:
“Childhood innocence is a seemingly natural condition but its rhetorical maneuvers are permeated by its elisions and attempted disavowals along the lines of race, class, gender and sexuality. That is, despite the familiar rhetorical insistence that children are the future, some children are withheld the benefits of being assumed inculpable (2)”
Ascriptions of childhood innocence thus require a child to replicate social norms including the production of the nuclear family. In the Philippines, where the liberalization of international trade and high levels of unemployment have disproportionately impacted the labour migration of women, structures of the nuclear family are being re-organized (Parreñas 2005; Tungohan 2013). Women who work outside of the Philippines and away from their families are paradoxically celebrated for their “sacrifice” while also subject to disapproval over their absence (Tungohan 2013). When mothers leave the Philippines, the care-arrangements for children are shifted. There is a growing recognition of the changing nature of motherhood within transnational contexts and the concomitant emotional consequences of negotiating “long distance intimacy” (Parreñas 2005). The demands for transnational labour reconfigure Filipinx family formations and necessitate fraught intimacies between parent and child across borders. Cyber technologies like cell phones and the Internet initiate creative opportunities for children to be “virtually present” in the lives of their mothers and vice versa.
“Parenthood” by Flickr user Saúl Alejandro Preciado Farías, CC BY 2.0
Drawing from Dyer, we might think of children who live without the physical presence of their mothers as “queer” to normative theories of childhood development that affirm overwrought expectations of maternal presence. She suggests that discourses of childhood innocence intend to subjugate the queerness of childhood and that these elisions hold bio-political significance. Faced with social inequities, Dyer emphasizes the importance of a child’s symbolic expression. She argues that children express their psychic and social conflicts aesthetically. A child’s imagination elaborates resistances to the enclosure of childhood innocence as a barometer of value. In this way, this article suggests a child’s singing and dancing are aesthetic expressions that take notice of the entangled traces of colonialism and nation, while resisting hierarchal structures that deem some childhoods more valuable than others.
The child’s sonic performance in the YouTube video is a queer offering that creatively procures transnational connection. Her singing registers a queer frequency that destabilizes normative theories of child development that assume a mother’s physical presence as necessary to developmental success. The girl’s performance suggests that psychic and political reparations can occur in the sounds the child makes. The tactile, spatial and physical qualities of her voice forge a new relation to her mother. Her voice is affecting, seemingly moving her mother to tears and rousing the onlookers at the Internet café to reorganize their bodies and sing along. In this video, we are invited to witness a child whose world has been altered by globalization and the continued geo-political violence’s enacted by the American empire. Given these circumstances, her “creative re-interpretation[s] of kinship” serves as a reminder that the affective fortitude of her voice tests physical and emotional borders (Dyer 2019). The restraint of normative conceptions of family is ruptured when the child remakes her relation to her mother in ways that stir joy, collectivity, and pleasure.
Screenshot from “
By observing and listening to the child’s songmoreclosely, we can listen for its potential to re-sound and re-imagine the parent-child relationship across borders. The sounds of “OFW Blank Space” linger after the clip has ended. By listening for what is in excess of the video’s content, we can consider the affective registers that enunciate alternative understandings of migration, family and belonging. There is a humming that is ubiquitous in the video. Perhaps, it is the sound of the electric fans that run to combat the tropical heat of the Philippines. Maybe it is the collective buzzing from the computers that have been set up to provide the Internet to its cybercafé patrons. The acoustics of the space are at once mundane and haphazard, and at the same time, cogent indicators of the geopolitical truths echoing throughout the scene. With limited access to Internet in the home, the cybercafé has been a site that children frequent to communicate with family working in another country. The convergence of sound, technology and diasporic subjectivity becomes audible when the practice of listening is attuned to these methods of transnational connection.
While listening to the pedagogical potential of the cybercafé more broadly, a focus on the vocal performance of the child reveals my investment in what the sound of her voice tells us. The video starts with greetings spoken in Tagalog, the primary language of the Philippines. When the backing track begins, the child makes a seamless transition into singing in English. In her vocal performance of the lyrics, her Filipino accent is almost undetectable. She sings with a dulcet tone that is clear and appealing. Her voice sounds well-trained and confident. If not for the video, one might believe the child to be a professional American performer. In this scene, it is her voice that is marked and constituted by a narrative of American imperial conquest and Filipino assimilation. But in a creative adaptation of American cultural production, the child re-writes this racialized script and uses American pop songs as a mechanism of care for both herself and her mother.
“Mother and daughter at home” by Flickr user Dejan Krsmanovic, CC-BY-2.0
The economic instability in the Philippines has created a state instituted transnational workforce. Women have been disproportionately affected by the demand for work in care industries such as nursing, childcare and care for the elderly (Francisco-Menchavez 2018). These gendered and racialized structures of employment privilege the presence of Filipinx women in families other than their own. The child is withheld a future that assures her the presence of her mother and their physical proximity is denied as a result of the demand for labour and capital exchange between nation-states. However, despite these circumstances, the child uses her voice to summon a beautiful intimacy, one that does not disavow the imperial history that marks its possibility, but instead uses loss as a resource to creatively mourn their separation. For the child, the act of singing is a replacement for her lost object, her mother. In the video we witness a child who is full of joy and whose strength of voice quells, if not, temporarily, whatever longing for her mother she might have. Relatedly, the child is also perceptive of her mother’s needs and uses music as a method of offering her care. Her performance creatively re-routes the presumed directionalities of care (from mother to child) which globalization has fundamentally altered.
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Featured image: “Children” by Flickr user Clive Varley, CC-BY-2.0
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Casey Mecija is an accomplished multi-disciplinary artist, primarily working in the fields of music and film. She played in Ohbijou, the Canadian orchestral pop band, and released her first solo album, entitled Psychic Materials, in 2016. Casey is also an award winning filmmaker whose work has screened internationally. She is completing a PhD at The University of Toronto, where she researches sound, performance studies and Filipinx Studies as they relate to queer diaspora.
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REWIND! . . .If you liked this post, you may also dig:
We have looked at a number of carbon calculators, not yet with the purpose of producing a number to describe our carbon footprint (since the accuracy and reliability of these calculators appears to vary) but to understand the categories we need to be considering, and the various energy-consuming elements within these. The three key categories we have identified are: our office activities, our travel, and the printing and delivery of the physical editions of our books.
Office
Heating and cooling homes and offices account for a significant proportion of overall carbon emissions. We have negotiated with King’s College (where we have our office space) to install more energy-efficient radiators, which have significantly improved our ability to control the temperature—thus preventing overheating (and making us all more comfortable!) and reducing wasted energy.
The old (and old-school!) radiators.The new and more energy-efficient model.
We have also spoken with King’s about installing LED lights, which use considerably less electricity—but this is something the college is already doing across all of its buildings over a period of time, and we are not able to accelerate the process in our office. This is one of the challenges of making changes in a space we don’t own: we don’t have complete autonomy and we therefore have to do what we can within certain constraints. With that in mind we are making smaller changes, such as being mindful of switching lights off in rarely-used areas.
Travel
We have made the decision not to fly at all this year, and we have been exploring remote participation at events to cut down on this and other types of travel. For example, in January at the kickoff meeting for the COPIM project, one of us stayed in the office rather than travelling to Coventry and participated remotely via Skype. The success of this attempt (after hurdling a couple of technological obstacles) demonstrated to us that such participation is workable, and it will now be a viable option as the project progresses—which is particularly significant given that the COPIM partners are located in America and in continental Europe, as well as in the UK.
We are also giving more webinars and remote presentations at universities and university libraries rather than travelling to speak, where this is appropriate. So far, this has met with mixed success—sometimes it has worked well, but on other occasions the opportunity for discussion has been limited by patchy audio or by other technical issues inhibiting interaction. Success has depended to a large degree on the technical infrastructure of the ‘host’ institution, and the extent to which they are practiced in facilitating remote participation.
How our members of staff get to work is also worth mentioning when discussing travel. The mode of transport each individual uses is, of course, a personal choice, but we are fortunate that Cambridge is a very friendly city for cyclists and the majority of our staff already commute by bicycle, with the remainder using public transport. Had this not been the case, we might have had conversations about car-pooling or other ways OBP could facilitate a greener commute for any staff members who might have wanted to try this.
Next Steps
We have thus had some success with our initial steps in attempting to reduce our carbon footprint, concentrating on our office environment and our work-related travel. The next post in this series will examine the environmental impact of the production and shipping of the printed editions of our books, and the trade-offs involved when making choices about this aspect of our business.
Many libraries in the UK and around the world use COUNTER statistics to measure the usage of their digital resources (including databases, online journals, ebooks and Open Access books) by members of their university. Because we know that libraries value COUNTER statistics, we offer our Library Members COUNTER-consistent metrics to measure their usage of our books, as one of several benefits of membership (which also include free ebooks available to all patrons to be kept permanently, discounts on printed copies for all patrons, MARC records, resources to discuss Open Access with students and staff, and more).[1]
But we are concerned about COUNTER statistics as a measure of the usage of Open Access digital resources by members of a specific university—and particularly when they are compared with similar statistics for ‘closed access’ and paywalled content.
COUNTER statistics are a reasonable measure of the use of commercial content, because the paywall acts as a ‘funnel’ guiding users to the publisher’s site to access the content (where, because the library has already paid for institutional access, it is toll-free to the individual user). Even when patrons are off campus they have an incentive to log in and access the digital resources via their remote-access credentials—or indeed, to delay accessing the content until they are within a university’s IP domain. The COUNTER metrics can therefore track the actual usage of commercial content with a relatively high degree of accuracy.
But there are problems with using COUNTER metrics to measure the usage of OA books by library patrons. Precisely because the books are Open Access, users are able to access the OA editions (PDF and, often, HTML and XML too) from any number of places, including Google Books, JSTOR, OAPEN, an author’s university repository—in fact, from anywhere they are shared online. That is the beauty of Open Access! But the lack of a paywall also means that the users are not ‘funnelled’ to access the content via one route that is easy to measure.
We are not currently able to provide university-specific usage data from any sites other than our own. So the COUNTER-consistent statistics we provide are only for actions recorded on the OBP website from an IP address registered to the university—necessarily a much lower number than the actual usage of our books by Library Members.
From conversations with some of our Library Members, we know that the library catalogues themselves often send people to other platforms, for example OAPEN, rather than to our website. We are not currently able to provide COUNTER-consistent metrics for usage of our books on these platforms—and more importantly, readers will not be able to access all of the benefits of the Library Membership there, some of which can only be accessed from our website. Other platforms typically offer only the PDF edition of our books—which is free to everyone—while our own site offers an array of different formats, including the ebook editions (free to Library Member users), the Open Access HTML and XML editions, and the paperback and hardback editions (discounted for Library Member users).
To get the most out of Library Membership, as well as to obtain a more accurate measurement of the usage of our books, libraries should therefore direct patrons to our website wherever possible. We aim to assist in this by providing MARC records as one of the benefits of Library Membership, in which the only URL included is the DOI—which directs to the book’s page on our website.
If readers were directed to our website, the COUNTER-consistent metrics would be more reflective of actual use—but they will still not be a complete measurement. The COUNTER data libraries get for OA content and the COUNTER data they get for closed-access content are not directly comparable, and there is a risk that the OA resources are seen as less popular with users simply because those users are not being efficiently funnelled by a paywall. We hope that librarians will bear this in mind when considering the usage patterns for the resources they support.
If you’re interested to find out more about metrics and OA books:
This post (written for the general reader) is a deep dive into what book usage data really tells us.
And this webpage explains the work we have done on book usage data with the HIRMEOS project, creating open source software and databases to collectively collect and host usage data from alternative platforms for multiple publishers. This work has significantly contributed to the development of the OPERAS Metrics Portal.
Finally, keep an eye on the activities of COPIM and particularly the ‘Building an Open Dissemination System’ project. OBP is taking a leading role in this project, which will develop technical protocols and infrastructure to better integrate OA books into institutional library, digital learning and repository systems. Everything COPIM creates will be openly available and community-governed for libraries, publishers and anybody else to adopt as they see fit. Follow the COPIM Twitter feed for updates!
[1] COUNTER-consistent metrics are collected using COUNTER’s specifications. The reason our data is not officially COUNTER compliant (meaning that COUNTER has officially recognised that our metrics are collected using their specifications) is because COUNTER charges a substantial fee to become COUNTER compliant, which, for a non-profit organisation like ours, is a significant barrier.
Sous la direction de Mélodie Faury & Marie-Anne Paveau
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