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Open Access Week is an an international event whose goal is to highlight how open
scholarship can help people meet their goals in research, scholarly publishing, teaching
and learning. Each year, as part of Open Access Week, UBC showcases diverse events
highlighting areas of open scholarship that UBC’s faculty, students and staff participate
in as well as guests from local and global community. This year’s events will explore the
evolving role of generative AI<https://genai.ubc.ca/> in open scholarship,
addressing its potential benefits and challenges, including ethical considerations related
to Indigenous knowledge, the impacts on institutional barriers, and strategies for
responsible use. All of these events are FREE and open to the public, students, faculty,
staff and schools.
The Influence of AI on Academic Publishing
Date: Monday, October 21, 2024
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online
Join us for a discussion with Taylor & Francis VP External Affairs and Policy, Priya
Madina, on AI and academic publishing. This session will provide an overview of AI and
opportunities and challenges of utilising AI, illustrated by academic publisher use cases
of AI. The presentation will be followed by a question and answer period.
This session will be recorded an made available in UBC’s institional repository,
cIRcle<http://circle.ubc.ca/>.
Presenter
* Priya Madina , Vice President, External Affairs and Policy, Taylor & Francis
Priya joined Taylor & Francis in December 2019. She has extensive experience in
developing and positioning global policies with relevant stakeholders and decision-makers.
Priya sits on the company’s Race and Ethnicity Network, the Publishers Association’s
Academic Publishers Council and chairs STM’s Open Research Committee.
Before joining the world of publishing, Priya spent ten years at GlaxoSmithKline in a
variety of government affairs, policy and market access roles. In her most recent role as
Director of Government Affairs, she led the company’s positioning on international
intellectual property and global health issues. She also gained experience in the
external affairs function for the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers
& Associations in Geneva.
Priya’s previous roles include working across a wide range of policy and government
affairs functions at the World Health Organization, the European Commission and the UK
Government‘s Department of Health. Her global and regional experience includes working in
the Philippines, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Belgium and France.
Priya has a Masters in Classics and Modern Languages from Oxford University. She speaks
English and French and has good knowledge of Hindi and Spanish.
Register<https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3839450>
“Stop Generating”: Generative AI in the Contexts of Indigenous Studies
Date: Thursday, October 24, 2024
Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
Location: Online
Generative AI has forced universities to contend with complex ethical and social
questions—namely because writing is so deeply entrenched as an institutional gatekeeping.
For many students, particularly those from marginalized backgrounds or for whom English is
not a first language, the pressure to translate ideas into “proper” English contributes to
attrition rates and exacerbates feelings of inadequacy, alienation, and exclusion from
many academic communities.
From an equity and inclusion perspective, AI has the potential to disrupt institutional
barriers by offering accessible tools that level the grammatical playing field. By
functioning as virtual tutors or co-writers, AI systems can assist students in producing
more polished and coherent prose, thus challenging the traditional hierarchies that
privilege certain grammatical and stylistic norms. Instead of attempting to ban these
tools (which is, to say the least, impractical), I side with a growing number of
technology scholars who argue that we should focus on teaching students how to use
generative AI responsibly and effectively. However, I do so with the caveat that teaching
responsible AI use means critically engaging the complex and often messy processes that
make AI what it is.
In this presentation, I draw from Indigenous theorists and authors to situate generative
AI and large language models (LLMs) within a long colonial history of extraction. Just as
colonial states declare Indigenous lands terra nullius, allowing settlers to exploit
resources through mining, clear-cutting, and other forms of extraction, generative AI
similarly depends on the unchecked extraction of data, including Indigenous knowledge and
cultural resources, often without consent. The late Gregory Younging refers to this
process as gnaritas nullius, the colonial rendering of Indigenous knowledge into public
property. The unchecked extraction of writing, including, but not limited to, Indigenous
knowledge, represents a new frontier for colonial capitalism, where cultural and
intellectual property are commodified by those with the most access and power. As Nando de
Freitas notes, the future of AI development depends on scale: those who control the
largest datasets will have the greatest advantage and profit the most from AI. The
numerous high-profile copyright cases against companies like OpenAI and Meta show that how
this data is collected is treated as a secondary issue. This unbridled, dehumanizing race
for data mirrors the extractive practices that have driven capitalist-colonial expansion
for centuries. Building on these ideas, I mobilize the insights of Indigenous authors like
Younging, Scott Lyons, and Cherie Dimaline to highlight strategies for resisting colonial
extraction and challenging capitalist systems through rhetorical sovereignty and the
concept of incommensurability. The goal is not to discourage the use of generative AI but,
in the Faustian sense, to reveal the costs of embracing it, especially when it is employed
to subvert oppressive institutional structures.
Speaker
* David Gaertner, Assoicate Professor, Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies
David Gaertner is an assistant professor in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies
and the co-Director of the CEDaR space: a community-centered new media and immersive
storytelling lab. He writes, researches, and teaches new media, critical Indigenous
studies; Indigenous literatures; contemporary Canadian literature, cultural theories of
reconciliation, and speculative fiction. He has published articles in Canadian Literature,
American Indian Research and Culture, and Digital Pedagogies in the Humanities, amongst
others. He is the author of The Theatre of Regret: Literature, Art and the Politics of
Reconciliation in Canada (UBC Press) and editor of Soykeyihta: The Poetry of Sky Dancer
Louise Bernice Halfe (WLUP).
Register<https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3820653>
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Additional Open Access Week Sessions:
Finding, Using, and Creating Open Educational
Resources<https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3814560>
Date: Wednesday, October 16, 2024
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Location: Online
Publishing a Book with Pressbooks – An
Introduction<https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3818866>
Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online
Accessibility and OER
Studio<https://events.ctlt.ubc.ca/events/accessibility-studio-october-22-2024/>
Date: Tuesday, October 22, 2024
Time: 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Location: Online
OER and GenAI<https://events.ctlt.ubc.ca/events/oer-and-genai-october-23-2024/>
Date: Wednesday, October 23, 2024
Time:11:00 am – 12:30 pm
Location: Online
Beware the Copyleft Trolls – Questionable Use of Open
Licenses<https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3818864>
Date: Tuesday, October 29, 2024
Time: 2:00pm – 3:00pm
Location: Online
Sharing & Discoverability – Making an Impact with your Open Education
Resources<https://libcal.library.ubc.ca/event/3814561>
Date: Wednesday, October 30, 2024
Time: 11:00am – 12:00pm
Location: Online