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.  

Twenty years ago the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI) released a statement of strategy and commitment to advocating for and realizing open access infrastructures across diverse institutions around the world.  In this episode we have the opportunity to hear from four individuals who have been part of that journey and work since the beginning: Melissa Hagemann, Senior Program Officer at Open Society Foundations; Peter Suber from Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication; Iryna Kuchma, Manager of the Open Access Program at Electronic Information for Libraries (EIFL) and Dominique Babini, Open Science Advisor at CLACSO, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences. ****Please take a moment to respond to some questions they have posed to the open access community at this link. Your inputs will help inform the 20th anniversary iteration of their statement of strategy. 

In this episode we speak with Rajesh Tandon, founder of the Society for Participatory Research in Asia (PRIA) based in New Delhi, India, and Budd Hall, Professor Emeritus at the University of Victoria in Canada. Budd and Rajesh jointly hold a UNESCO Chair in Community Based Research and Social Responsibility in Higher Education . They reflect on coining the concept of "knowledge democracy" and participating in the consultations related to the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science. 

In our second season, we continue our mission of interrogating the politics of knowledge production, exchange and circulation - but with a specific focus on open science and open access. In this first episode we speak with Eleanor Haine, Program Officer at the Canadian Commission for UNESCO and Fernanda Beigel, Chair of the UNESCO Open Science Advisory Committee and Researcher at CONICET. Both have been actively involved in the drafting of the UNESCO Recommendation on Open Science -  and from their different geographical, institutional and personal perspectives they share what open science means to them and what they and their colleagues have been fighting for. 

In the final episode of our first season, we are in conversation with artist Jasmeen Patheja. Jasmeen is the founder of BlankNoise -  a multi city / multi country collective that has been instrumental in building public discourse and shifting conciseness on sexual violence in public spaces. 

In our fourth episode we are in conversation with Thenmozhi Soundararajan, a technologist, transmedia artist and activist. Thenmozhi is the Executive Director of Equality Labs, a South Asian power-building organization that uses community research, political base-building, culture-shifting art, and digital security to end the oppression of caste apartheid, Islamophobia, white supremacy, and religious intolerance in both the diaspora and the South Asian subcontinent. 

In our third episode we are in conversation with  Dr. James Tumwine, Professor of Paediatrics and Child Health who recently retired from the School of Medicine, College of Health Sciences in Makerere University at Mulago Hospital in Kampala, Uganda. Professor Tumwine is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of African Health Sciences, an open access, free, internationally refereed, multidisciplinary journal publishing original articles on research, clinical practice, public health, policy, planning, and implementation and evaluation in health and related sciences in African countries.

In our second episode we are in conversation with Dr. Lorna Wánosts’a7 Williams, one of the leading Indigenous woman educators and scholars in Canada who has long championed decolonial education, the centering of Indigenous knowledge systems and the revitalization of Indigenous languages.  ( This is the link to Lilwat principles of teaching learning website.) 

In our first episode we speak with Leslie Chan from the Knowledge Equity Lab, Nick Shockey from SPARC, as well as 3 younger generation members of the Lab : Kanishka Sikri, Blessing Timidi Digha, and Denisse Albornoz. They reflect on what knowledge equity means to them, how and why they are committed to working on realizing it through systems change, what that might look like, knowledge translation for social justice, and much more.