Open Knowledge under Attack: How knowledge and heritage institutions can build resilience under the rise of right-wing populism
Across the world, cultural heritage institutions and the open knowledge ecosystem are facing growing political pressure. During the last couple of years, we have seen the dismissal of senior GLAM officials and executive orders targeting museums in the United States. Alongside attempts to curtail diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have become more common, with similar attacks in Latin America that replicate those from the United States on a no less harmful scale. Examples in Europe have shown how right-wing movements are trying to politicize or diminish cultural heritage and memory institutions. In Ukraine, cultural heritage institutions and monuments are threatened every day by Russia's war.
In the Wikimedia movement, we are dependent on robust and open exchange of knowledge. Still, we are increasingly aware of how quickly open knowledge infrastructures can become defunded, attacked, or censored. These dynamics do not remain confined to national contexts and we see their effects throughout the open knowledge ecosystem and WikiGLAM partnerships.
This panel explores what these shifts mean for institutions and volunteers committed to free, reliable, and equitable access to knowledge. When memory institutions, research infrastructures and organizations are weakened, the Wikimedia ecosystem is directly affected. If we lose access to trusted sources at the same time as our knowledge infrastructures get fragmentized, our founding ground is destabilized.
Bringing together perspectives from international cultural heritage and knowledge institutions as well as the Wikimedia movement, the panel aims to highlight strategies for safeguarding open knowledge infrastructures and marginalized knowledge in times of political turmoil.
