Knowledge Equity Lab
Background - The Knowledge Equity Lab (KEL) is an inclusive, trans-disciplinary, experimental space at the University of Toronto Scarborough established in 2020. It is a research and practice hub of projects that investigate and challenge exclusion within the structures of knowledge production and exchange. KEL serves as an umbrella for Bioline International, an open access platform for journals based in the Global South, and the Open and Collaborative Science for Development Network (OCSDNet), exploring open science as a tool for transformative development. It also houses The Knowledge G.A.P. project, the Open Praxis Forum, Community Knowledge Learning Hub, and the UNESCO Knowledge for Change Toronto Hub.
Mission - KEL was created to provide a space for students to work with diverse knowledge makers in ways that are not traditionally accommodated in the university. It is a move away from an extractive mode of research. KEL embraces the idea that to understand challenges with health, employment, education, and social justice, there is a need to be fully immersed in the community and to listen so that research is relevant. KEL strives to advance principles and practices of community-based infrastructure, provide experiential learning opportunities, and co-create equitable spaces in places of institutional power and privilege. One of the most visible ways KEL has advanced its mission is through a podcast series (Unsettling Knowledge Inequities) developed in partnership with SPARC, that interrogates the politics of knowledge production and circulation and the global power dynamics that shape it.
Community over Commercialization:
“The primary goal of the Knowledge Equity Lab is to remind ourselves that knowledge production always resides in communities, and it has often historically been free of commercial intervention. People create knowledge, share knowledge without expectations of any financial return because they know knowledge is important for our well-being and mutual happiness. So, the notion of a community as being the site of knowledge generation, use, and reproduction has always been the goal—reminding people about what knowledge is about.”
“We have the Knowledge Equity Lab to remind ourselves that we, as a university—and as different disciplines—do best when we have a community of scholars and practitioners and interact with each other.”
“When I was in graduate school years ago, a journal was a community. You contributed to that community, you benefited from that community, and you, in turn, also grew as part of that community. It was a community of scholars to get feedback, peer review and mentorship from, and then for you, in turn, to mentor future generations. Journal served as community connectors. That was the nature of what I understood journals to be.”
“Once journals were commercialized, they were all turned into, literally, profit centers. They became places where a publisher could extract profit from free labor by academics. We end up writing for the publishers, peer reviewing for the publishers, editing for the publishers, with very little in return, other than those who get prestige, brownie points and metrics that are sought after.”
“Because the publishers control the metrics, they are able to really control academic thinking and governance and labor. The sense of community has been replaced by the sense of metrics. Many publishers are only too happy to use that to just draw on the need of researchers to meet those expectations.”
“Over time, what I've seen is that the sense of community has been lost. A lot of graduate students have no sense of who their communities are. They might be told by their supervisor to publish in that journal or this journal, but all they know about those journals is how they're going to get points and future employment based on those metrics.”
“To me, why it is important to have communities is because knowledge is created within communities and shared between communities. Commercialization destroyed that very sense of community. We need to remind ourselves what journals are, what publishing means, and what knowledge production and circulation are really about. The work of the Knowledge Equity Lab is to cultivate community and weave local communities into the process of knowledge production and sharing.”
-Leslie Chan, Director, Knowledge Equity Lab