Unsettling Knowledge Inequities

Knowledge Equity Lab

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The Unsettling Knowledge Inequities podcast features conversations with diverse and multigenerational knowledge holders. Episodes aim to interrogate the politics of knowledge production and circulation and the global power dynamics that shape it - as well as highlight alternative models and collaborations between distinct knowledge traditions.

OCT 8

From Humanitarian Aid to Global Affairs with Aly-Khan Rajani

In our first episode, of our new season "From Campus to Career: Development Practitioners in Action," we are in conversation with Aly-Khan Rajani, the current Director for Canada's Indo-Pacific Strategy Regional Coordination and Policy and Planning. Aly-Khan's career is vast, beginning with his International Development Studies co-op with CARE in Zambia to working in humanitarian aid, communications, government and policy. He's worked globally in Afghanistan, Cairo, Beirut, Mumbai, New Delhi and was recently Canada's Ambassador to the Republic of South Sudan. Join us to learn more about the specifics of Aly-Khan's career trajectory, the choices he made along the way, the many learnings that emerged for him, and what continues to fuels his purpose. The Knowledge Equity Lab's Season 4, podcast series, "From Campus to Career" features conversations with some of the stellar alumni from University of Toronto’s International Development Studies Co-op program, uncovering the stories behind their careers in global development. From the classroom to the field, these conversations trace the choices, pivots, and passions that shaped their journeys and continue to inspire new ways of thinking about global and local development.

56 min
2022-11-21

Digital Redlining, Friction-Free Racism and Luxury Surveillance in the Academy

In the final episode of our third season, we are joined by Chris Gilliard, a professor and scholar who is highly regarded for his critiques of surveillance technology, privacy, and the invisible but problematic ways that digital technologies intersect with race, social class and marginalized communities. In particular, Chris’ work highlights the discriminatory practices that algorithmic decision-making enables - especially as these apply in the higher education context. We discuss the various problems that surveillance technology and AI pose for higher education and the future of research, scholarship and academic publishing.

43 min
2022-11-01

The Perils of Artificial Intelligence in Academic Publishing

One of the key themes that intersects across all of our episodes this season is the surveillance and highly extractive and harmful economic practices of big corporations in the academic publishing sector, whose artificial intelligence tools are creating new forms of control and governance over our daily and professional activities. In this episode, we are joined by Christine Cooper, Yves Gendron, and Jane Andrew - co-editors of the Critical Perspectives on Accounting journal and co-authors of the article: “The perils of artificial intelligence in academic publishing.” We reflect on how automated decision making algorithms are deployed in academic publishing, particularly for peer review and related editorial decision making - and explore the implications of these technologies on research practices, scholarly expertise and autonomy, and the struggle for control over the future of “sustainability, creativity, and critical values of the academic world.”

58 min
2022-10-18

The High Cost of Knowledge Monopoly

Over the past 20 years, the academic publishing market has undergone changes that have led us to a juncture where power is concentrated in the hands of a handful of big companies. To help us understand how this came to be and its implications, we are joined today by Claudio Aspesi, a leading market analyst for the academic publishing market. Claudio is a consultant at SPARC, and has authored several reports about the market power and consolidation of the largest commercial players in this space. Resources: SPARC Landscape Analysis: The Changing Academic Publishing Industry : Implications for Academic Institutions https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1100&context=scholcom

40 min
2022-10-04

Data Cartels & Surveillance Publishing

Over the last years, as the process of conducting research and scholarship has moved more and more online, it has become clear that user surveillance and data extraction has crept into academic infrastructure in multiple ways. For those committed to preserving academic freedom and knowledge equity, it's important to interrogate the practices and structures of the companies that are collecting and selling this data, and the impacts of this business model on academic infrastructure - and particularly on already marginalized and underfunded scholars and students. To help us understand this landscape and its implications, today we are in conversation with Sarah Lamdan, author of the forthcoming book Data Cartels: The Companies That Control and Monopolize Our Information.

45 min
2022-09-20

AI & Automating Knowledge Inequity

In our third season, we continue our goal of interrogating the politics of knowledge production, exchange and circulation - but with a special focus on exploring the implications of the widespread and often uncritical use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies. In particular we will examine how the use of these technologies by corporate publishers and data analytics companies can replicate and exacerbate existing structural and other forms of inequities in societies and in academia. In this first episode, we are joined by colleagues from the Distributed AI Research Institute - Dr. Alex Hannah, Dylan Baker, and Dr. Milagros Miceli. DAIR is an interdisciplinary and globally distributed organization rooted in the belief that AI is not inevitable, its harms are preventable, and when its production and deployment include more diverse perspectives and more deliberate processes, it can be beneficial. Resources mentioned in episode: https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street https://people.clarkson.edu/~jmatthew/publications/Wali_ParticipatoryML_ICML2020.pdfhttps://logicmag.io/beacons/the-oversight-bloc/ Other relevant resources: Datasets have Worldviews https://pair.withgoogle.com/explorables/dataset-worldviews/Measuring Diversity https://pair.withgoogle.com/explorables/measuring-diversity/Milagros Miceli, Tianling Yang, Adriana Alvarado Garcia, Julian Posada, Sonja MeiWang, Marc Pohl, and Alex Hanna. 2022. Documenting Data Production Processes: A Participatory Approach for Data Work. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2 (August 2022), 34 pages.https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.04958Gebru, T., Morgenstern, J., Vecchione, B., Vaughan, J. W., Wallach, H., Iii, H. D., & Crawford, K. (2021). Datasheets for datasets. Communications of the ACM, 64(12), 86–92. https://doi.org/10.1145/3458723

48 min
2021-11-09

Early Career Researchers: Open Science & Activism

In the last episode of our second season we are in conversation with two early career researchers and activists - Denisse Albornoz and Antoinette Foster. They reflect on how the values of openness, equity, safety, accountability and much more have influenced and informed their work and career trajectories both in academia and beyond.

42 min
2021-10-26

Indigenous Epistemologies & Open Science: Learning from the Land

In November 2020, the world’s first Virtual Indigenous Circle on Open Science and the Decolonization of Knowledge took place. The Circle format was designed by Dr Lorna Wanósts’a7 Williams and featured nearly 20 Indigenous speakers from around the world. They came together to inform UNESCO’s recommendation on Open Science and ensure that Indigenous knowledge and perspectives would be incorporated respectfully and with integrity into the recommendation. In this episode, four of those participants (Lorna Wanósts’a7 Williams, Greg Cajete, Manulani Aluli Meyer, and Sonajharia Minz) have gathered again to extend that conversation and further speak to Indigenous epistemologies, their personal journeys in science and academia, and many vital reflections on being attuned to the quality of our relationships, changing our consciousness, cultivating a sense of reverence, and much much more.

1h 7m

TRAILER

Trailer

Unsettling Knowledge Inequities

2021-01-19

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4 min

5

out of 5

2 Ratings

The Unsettling Knowledge Inequities podcast features conversations with diverse and multigenerational knowledge holders. Episodes aim to interrogate the politics of knowledge production and circulation and the global power dynamics that shape it - as well as highlight alternative models and collaborations between distinct knowledge traditions.

Creator

Knowledge Equity Lab
Years Active

2021 - 2025
Episodes

17
Rating

Explicit
Copyright

© 2025 Unsettling Knowledge Inequities
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Unsettling Knowledge Inequities