Defending Academic Freedom in an Age of Censorship: Reflections from author Ash Lierman

By Ash Lierman, Instruction & Education Librarian at Campbell Library, Rowan University, New Jersey, USA

As an OBP author in the U.S., the impacts I personally experience from the current environment are multivalent. I am a university librarian, so aspects of my livelihood are at risk from massive cuts in funding to university research and in federal support for libraries. I support the faculty researchers, doctoral and master’s students, and pre-service teachers in my university’s College of Education, so I am keenly aware of the devastating impacts promised by the dismantling of the Department of Education. I am also an educational researcher in my own right, with a book published by OBP focused on disabled and neurodivergent students in higher education: one of the marginalized communities we are to be prohibited from referring to as such, facing the systemic oppression and discrimination we are to be prohibited from naming, who are sure to be even more disenfranchised than ever by attacks on their legal protections and the governmental bodies charged with their programs and services.

At the same time, I am also a disabled and transgender researcher. I was drawn in large part to my research because of the intersectional identities I share with many of its subjects, and in no way am I alone in this. Many scholars of topics increasingly identified as “politically sensitive,” and many of those recognized as the most brilliant luminaries of their fields, are invested in these topics in part because of the connections of personal identities. Their scholarship is informed and enriched by their insider perspectives, and by the challenges these perspectives can present to normative framings and ways of knowing. For those of us who share the identities we study, research is more than only research. At its best, it is joining together with our communities to better the lives of their members, conducted with (not on) partners rather than subjects. More personally still, it is drawn from and inscribed upon our own bodies. We cannot be separated from our research; it is us. A necessary consequence is that, when the subjects of our work are made ineligible for funding and a risk to our institutions, when the language that describes them is made taboo, we are doubly erased: not just intellectually, but personally. We are the diversity that the university can no longer risk openly valuing – not to mention the “gender ideology,” in my case and those of many other underrepresented, precarious, and marginalized trans academics.

All of this was of course on my mind as I attended the stellar Thinking Trans // Trans Thinking conference, hosted by the department of Philosophy at Lafayette College, at the end of March. (Interdisciplinarity has never been optional for librarians; we are always called upon to develop a knowledge of the research landscape that transcends boundaries.) In the Methods panel that opened the second day, I had the privilege of hearing from Blas Radi, a philosopher and scholar of social epistemology and trans studies at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, as one of the invited speakers. Beyond the main content of his presentation, he also offered his perspective to the discussion of doing trans studies in the current repressive political climate of the U.S., positioning it alongside the extremely repressive political climate of Argentina in which he has worked for years. It served as a crucial reminder, to me and I think to others present, of what should not be forgotten: what scholars in the U.S. are now facing as a crisis is the least of what has been a normal situation across large parts of the world for decades, particularly in the Global South – and, in many cases, under regimes that were enabled by American exploitation and imperialism.

It is this, in turn, that leads me back to OBP, Diamond Open Access in general, and the potential that it holds now more than ever. OA has often been recognized as playing a vital role in democratizing research and publication, especially for researchers from the Global South and other circumstances that may limit their access to funds and freedom of information. This is particularly true in the case of Diamond OA, which additionally supports equal access to publishing by scholars from the Global South by removing the barrier of publication fees. This equalizing power has been a driving force in its support from the library profession, and it was my values as a librarian around knowledge justice that led me to choose OA publishing for my own work. Now, with the threats that research faces in the U.S., OA offers to play the same role for many of us who have previously had the privilege of overlooking it.

In this aspect, as in others, this moment is actually an opportunity for American researchers: to find solidarity and build coalitions internationally, to learn with humility from those who have gone through this before us, to invest in structures that truly support knowledge production by and for all of us, and to work toward protecting and helping one another through oppressive structures and regimes. These are not small tasks to undertake, I acknowledge, especially when the stress and fear of the rapid changes in our situation feel so overwhelming. There are real and pragmatic threats that loom over our lives that must be managed, and ourselves and our loved ones to care for. I think it is also important to remember, though, that danger is not the only thing here for us in this moment. As the example of OA can demonstrate, there is also the potential to pursue renewal and reimaginings of how research is structured, and the chance that we could one day rise from what is broken with something stronger.

Read our stance on censorship: OBP has also written about open access and academic freedom from our perspective as an open access publisher in this post.

You can also read Ash’s book, The Struggle You Can’t See: Experiences of Neurodivergent and Invisibly Disabled Students in Higher Education.