Challenging Academic Gatekeeping: Open scholarship and Virtually Connecting

What happens when those at the margins choose to become agents of their own empowerment, and challenge the ways in which they have been marginalized in the past? In what ways has open and connected learning, as previously conceived by academics in the North and West failed us as global South academics? In this presentation, I will tell the story of Virtually Connecting, an organization I co-founded that is based on open and connected learning principles, based on a simple, grassroots design, but which has challenged academic gatekeeping at academic conferences in the field of educational technology. The driving force behind Virtually Connecting started as a passion about enhancing the virtual conference experience for people who could not attend conferences for financial, social, logistical, health or other reasons, but has morphed into a larger project of expanding academic conversations to include marginalized voices of women, international scholars, precarious academics and students whose voices are otherwise excluded from academic events. These events that require travel and budgets have historically been necessary for academics to acquire the social and cultural capital needed to develop and grow, and previous attempts at “virtualizing” these spaces had failed to challenge the status quo. In this presentation, I’ll discuss the ways in which Virtually connecting has succeeded, but also the limitations and struggles we face as we strive towards more inclusion and challenging inequity with this approach.