Designing Heterotopic Transversal Equitable Foundations for Open Knowledge: Access, Freedom & e/Quality

Abstract

Following on the publications based on Smit’s 2017 International Open Access lecture (cf. Smit & Chetty 2018a; and 2018b), we capture some aspects from his 2018 presentation, in this article. It further develops his exploration of the significance of Michel Foucault’s triad, subject – communication – knowledge-power production in the digital paradigm, or e-episteme, in terms of knowledge-power networks (KPNs). For this, the article has two main parts. Firstly, it provides a theoretical framework for the empirical interpretation of the 2018 international topic for the Open Access week, seminally, incorporating the no-tions of the ‘heterotopic’ and ‘transversal’. Secondly, in South Africa’s ascendant history into openness, as a free country, it provides a sample of three significant events in our affirmative genealogy, or genealogies, of freedom. These are, access to the full participation in, or ‘contribution’ to, world civilization, or world information-, data-, or knowledge-power, or science-power productions, á la Anton Lembede; freedom as founded in the Universal Declaration of Hu-man Rights (UDHR); and equity/ equality/ e/Quality, as founded in ‘The Free-dom Charter’. As such, the advocacy for access, freedom, and equality in South Africa’s affirmative genealogy of freedom, are three of the seminal elements, and historical empirical events, for South Africa’s entry into its free democratic dispensation, in 1994. The presentation was dedicated to the international celebration of the seventieth year of the founding of the UDHR, in 1948.