Shelly Eversley and Laurie Hurson
“The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot” (Lorde and Rich 1981, 727). Audre Lorde described this process in a conversation with Adrienne Rich about teaching. For both Lorde and Rich, teaching is learning. They understood the riotous potential of learning, of something Lorde also described as “the transformation of silence into language and action” (Lorde 2007, 40). The two became colleagues and collaborators while teaching in the City University of New York’s SEEK Program, an open admissions investment that has made college education possible for thousands of the city’s working-class people of color. The program began, in part, as a result of Black and Latino student uprisings in the late 1960s (“Second Chances” 2012). In those turbulent times, the students were demanding access to higher education; the teachers who welcomed them were committed to learning as an opportunity to change the social order. For Lorde and Rich, the learning they would incite was also framed by the rise of Black studies and women’s studies programs as well as social equality and peace movements, including activisms for gay liberation and women’s equality and their various affinity groups. Learning was (and still is) inseparable from politics. It demands risk: “How do you deal with things you believe, live them not as theory, not even as emotion, but right on the line of action and effect change?” (Lorde and Rich 1981, 734). Their poems, essays, and activist pedagogies provide some answers to this question; their examples inspire our commitment to learning.
When we imagined and built EqualityArchive.com, we also wanted to incite a riot. We wanted to create an opportunity to change the social order, an opportunity for learning about the people, history, and issues around the fight for self-identified women’s gender equality in the United States. These commitments could help us organize a vivid offering at the intersections of theory, lived experience, and practice—a feminist praxis for a generation trained to seek information online (Eversley and Hurson 2017). We hoped that by assembling various parts of feminist knowledge in uncomplicated multimodal forms, we could inspire action. And, following Lorde’s and Rich’s commitment to learning, we understood our project needed to be open access, available for free to any curious person interested in learning.
Our method is queer. As collaborators, our creative and intellectual relationship requires an openness to change and to transformation. As queer, our process welcomes the kinds of multiplicity, misalignments, and silences Matt Brim and Amin Ghaziani associate with “how we study the social construction of sexuality and the sexual construction of the social” (2016, 16). To build a digital archive about gender equality is also to explore the messiness and interconnectedness of sexuality, sex, and of the constructs that shape not only thought, but also action. When we decided to focus on self-identified women’s gender equality, we understood we would be confronting various and often contested perspectives on how to think about gender identity, about equality, and about the United States and its borders. Lorde and Rich remind us to “never close our eyes to the terror, the chaos” (1981, 730), so with eyes open we launched EqualityArchive.com. Our process, like our project, is dialogic.
SE: When we first started talking about building the archive, I referenced the Equal Rights Amendment website. It is loaded with so much important information about the constitutional amendment that is only one state shy of ratification. “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of sex,” could be part of the U.S. Constitution in our lifetime. And then I started to wonder how many people know this, how could we create a digital learning and activist community around sex and gender equality embedded in the material world, and responsive to the multiple ways people seek reliable information online, whether on computers, smart phones, or tablets.
LH: When you shared your vision for Equality Archive with me I immediately wanted to be part of a project that would publish perspectives and histories that are often marginalized and obscured in crowd-sourced, digital information sources. In our initial conversation the platform you envisioned would be easy to navigate and accessible to young people by providing media-rich resources about intersectional and academic ideas in a contemporary and digestible format. The combination of information legibility and multimodality was possible by building Equality Archive with the flexible and easy-to-use WordPress web framework. WordPress met our needs because it was functionally and ideologically aligned with the visions for this project. WordPress also facilitated our collaboration by allowing us to build and design EqualityArchive.com in the way that we describe our vision as a “theater for history and social justice with the goal to provide a forum for curious people” (Equality Archive 2016).
Since WordPress connects easily to the open web through API integrations and other plugins, we could incorporate various types of content that young people engage with such as videos, audio clips, and image galleries. Because it is an open-source framework, WordPress situated us within a networked community that values free/libre resources, provides peer support, shares framework information, and updates often (WordPress.org 2018a). In the same way that epistemological lineage matters, thinking below the level of our web framework, we chose to host the project with Reclaim Hosting, which is designed to help educators create projects that are owned and controlled by the scholars who create them.
SE: You set the course for our commitment to open-source technology. In so many important ways, the radical trust associated with some of the most transformative open source collaboratives—like Wikipedia and WordPress—have disrupted traditional academic models of knowledge and of learning. Instead of the old, vertical hierarchies of learning, Equality Archive celebrates the kinds of intersections and assemblages that emerge from collaborative processes. When a teacher, scholar, activist, or artist contributes an entry, our collective reviews it for factual accuracy. This version of “peer review” reflects our smaller-scale version of the kinds of crowd-sourced checks and balances integral to an open-source project like Wikipedia. It shifts the structure and the orientation of more traditional models of thinking and learning.
LH: Absolutely. Our small-scale but robust method of peer-review allows us to push the boundaries of what is considered “academic” and therefore trustworthy. The collective peer review ensures that the entries provide relevant, well-sourced information while also embracing the dynamic media-centric nature of the web. In this way, the multimodal, openly accessible entries on Equality Archive challenge traditional notions of academic publishing as the means for sharing knowledge. As universities and learning institutions embrace free and open sources of knowledge as part of the movement toward Open Education Resources (OER), Equality Archive provides faculty and students with myriad opportunities to teach, learn, and explore these open resources. Equality Archive offers resources that could be integral for faculty looking to engage with and develop critical and digital pedagogies that embrace discovery and community (Stommel 2014). By presenting entries that highlight often overlooked topics and voices, Equality Archive works to queer the OER movement itself, adding to the catalog and expanding the boundaries of open knowledge. By incorporating many voices in the creation, review, and content of the entries, the Equality Archive strives to embody feminist collectivity and collaboration.
SE: Exactly. Equality Archive is a collective project. It belongs to no one and to everyone. New contributors are always welcome. We seek feminist artists, teachers, writers, or activists whose knowledge would communicate the layers, intersections, and disputes about gender equality in the United States that could help us learn, and, we hope, use knowledge in the service of social justice. That’s why every entry also includes an opportunity to get involved. Embedded in each entry is at least one opportunity to connect with a social or political organization committed to gender justice. By including access to opportunities to get involved, we hope the curious visitor can recognize the connections between thought and action, between what they think and how they imagine the world.
LH: Yes, and by providing curious people with information and opportunities to act. Equality Archive entries aim to connect visitors with chances to participate by presenting multiple entry points for interaction with the content. By providing multiple mediums including text, images, videos, audio clips, and links, Equality Archive attempts to address the variety of ways in which people learn, across engagement styles, levels of ability, and literacy. Equality Archive hopes to cultivate a culture of increasing information literacy, linking visitors to well-researched and established information sources at a time when mainstream media is often contested and inflammatory. Just like any skill, developing the ability to find and assess sources can be fostered over time, and Equality Archive hopes to play a role in this ongoing progression. Recognizing that people understand and process information in various ways, the content on EqualityArchive.com is networked through a taxonomy of categories and tags, both organizational features of WordPress, in order to allow visitors to navigate the site in a way that follows their flow of thought and interest.
SE: Sara Ahmed’s description of a queer phenomenology, one that positions “the question of the ‘orientation’ of ‘sexual orientation’ as a phenomenological question” (2006, 1), really resonates in our method. Ahmed calls attention to the lines of thought that would orient us toward a “compulsory heterosexuality” (EqualityArchive.com), and that would orient knowledge to perceive only one option for human sexuality. If Equality Archive’s nonlinear, intersectional assemblage can offer a disruption to a singular phenomenology, to a “straight” line of thought, then maybe it can offer alternative lines of orientation, of perception, transforming what we know and also our own relationship to knowledge. Our mission is to advance multiple lines of thinking, in multiple registers, all at the same time. This is how we would like to incite a riot since we think of gender inequality as a heteronormative knowledge form. If people find themselves oriented toward sexism and misogyny because of a straight phenomenology that facilitates it, then our ambition is to advocate for queering knowledge. In this way, Equality Archive seeks to resist the phenomenology of misogyny. Its ambition is to be out of line, as it were.
LH: Our project challenges linear and canonical knowledge in favor of nonlinear, open knowledges from the borders and margins. Reacting to the epistemological violence (Teo 2010) inflicted by traditional academic knowledge production, Equality Archive presents new possibilities for knowledge creation, learning, and action. Opposing a linear progression of entries, the information on Equality Archive is organized into a linked network of content. Relying on hyperlinks to connect information, which is the foundational feature of the web 2.0, Equality Archive entries connect voices and ideas to one another and also move beyond the platform, connecting to the open web by linking to outside sources and allowing outside sources to link back and reference Equality Archive entries. As the archive grows, new entries are “bound in to the structure of the web by other users discovering the content and linking to it” (O’ Reilly 2012).
In the spirit of taking action and building the connections between Equality Archive and the open web, we have facilitated several Wikipedia edit-a-thons to develop these linkages (Wikipedia 2017). During one particular event, participants searched for underdeveloped Wikipedia entries on topics that were well documented in Equality Archive. When insufficient Wikipedia entries were found, participants edited Wikipedia to add information to these entries and linked back to the Equality Archive as the secondary reference source (standard practice for Wikipedia editing). Creating these linkages connects Equality Archive to Wikipedia, the largest repository of information in the world, so that even more people have the chance to visit and learn from the open knowledge our archive offers. Linking to Equality Archive as a source on Wikipedia puts the marginalized voices and ideas presented on the platform into conversation with more traditional sources on the web.
By developing these links to connect information we acknowledge how reading and engagement with information has changed. Current readers, thinkers, and visitors constantly jump between sources, so we aim to make Equality Archive as accessible as possible by creating opportunities for discovery. This practice acknowledges the dominance of Google’s page rank system, which ranks sources based on the number of links to and from a site, while also resisting this system and the dominance of certain sources by attempting to inject our links into these rankings. Google’s page rank system often supports algorithmic bias (Noble 2018), returning results that are skewed by race, sex, and class. Equality Archive fights this bias by constantly developing the platform so that individuals can find content that contains feminist and queer ideas, voices, and histories that speak to their experiences so they can begin to form new phenomenologies and ways of knowing.
SE: It’s been an important part of our feminist praxis to explore cyberfeminisms (Daniels 2009) and the transgressive potentials to experiment with the range of theories and practices surrounding gender identity and digital culture. We also have been thinking a lot about class identity as an important question of access, which like language, ability, and race affect how individuals use digital tools. As the project grows, we will continue to learn and adapt.
LH: For sure. Aside from addressing and cultivating informational literacy, our project certainly has more work to do in addressing how visitors can use Equality Archive, especially by thinking through various levels of ability. In the future we should consider creating audio clips for each entry, optimizing the site for screen-readers, and providing translations so we can forge better connections with more kinds of curious people from around the world.
SE: And the seeming rise of web 3.0 is another challenge: should we publish Equality Archive on a blockchain platform? We know the internet is always changing. Our queer method requires that we pay attention and prepare for its adaptations and its multiple forms. Right now, most people think about cryptocurrencies when they try to discern what blockchain technology is, and while financial markets are a big part of the ecosystem of web 3.0, also known as blockchain, there is so much more in development. Blockchain offers peer-to-peer digital storage. In this web 3.0 model, private networks like Facebook, Google, or Uber can no longer dominate public infrastructures. These infrastructures would no longer have control over a person’s online activities—for instance, networks and mobile phone providers would not be able to surveil and own our information. This is what decentralization means for web 3.0 and blockchain technology. It also claims end users will own and control their data, that data breaches will dramatically decline, and that end users will have unrestricted access to information regardless of geography or because of any other social and demographic factors (Zago n.d.).
As teachers and learners committed to open education and queer phenomenologies, we have to pay attention to new developments in ethical and sustainable models for publishing and distributing reliable information. Our political climate demands it. For instance, some blockchain publishing platforms are now advocating commitments to press freedom and accountability in the face of global changes in technology, economics, and politics. Their interest in these new developments in open access, especially censorship-resistant open access, along with permanent non-erasable archiving, suggests truly innovative and disruptive potentials (Zalatimo 2018). And when nonprofit organizations on web 3.0 build platforms that recognize the increasing need to protect end users’ privacy as well as their right to free access to information (“Civil Constitution” n.d.), it is important that we pay attention—especially since our ambition to change the way people think is also a confrontation with the status quo.
LH: Theoretically, the foundational principles of decentralization and transparency inherent to blockchain do coalesce with Equality Archive’s commitment to decentralized knowledges and collective and transparent knowledge production. Blockchain and web 3.0 infrastructures offer possibilities to change the way we create, publish, and share information. Creating a web that gives people ownership over their data and unrestricted access to information would be a welcome move away from the capitalist control of data and levels of surveillance we have seen recently (Zuboff 2014). The potentialities presented by web 3.0 hold promise for what the web could ultimately become.
Changes to the web raise questions about infrastructure, development, community support, and critical mass adoption of new frameworks for creating and sharing information. Most foundationally, it is critical for Equality Archive to work with the affordances of web 2.0 and also consider the possibilities that blockchain and web 3.0 offer. How can we strike a middle ground, reaching curious visitors and providing them with information while also pushing them to engage with the web in new ways? Contending with these possibilities will allow Equality Archive to embrace new phenomenologies while remaining accessible to all visitors across varying levels of ability, learning style, and method of engagement. And beyond making our platform accessible, it is equally important to fight the algorithmic bias that will continue to silence the voices Equality Archive attempts to highlight and uplift.
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