This blog post serves as an exploratory and developmental process for my PhD. Its focus is on the academic literature I engage with, presented in a blog format, against the backdrop of professional contexts. A blogging approach enables exploration of the ties between research and practice, supporting reflexivity.
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A few years ago, my PhD supervisors suggested I might like to incorporate critical disability studies into my thesis as methodology. I pushed back initially. In part, this was because I wanted my research on open access to be entirely separate from disability. Additionally, the theoretical connection between the two wasn’t immediately apparent to me.
It took time, career progression, thinking about institutional theory and governance, a lot of reflective writing, and reading different perspectives on scholarly publishing for a connection to form and click for me, finally. Hence, lately, I’ve been doing a lot more writing at the intersection of critical disability studies, openness, and knowledge production (and the conditions that govern these).
Most recently, I became interested in how care ethics, vulnerability, and symbolic capital intersect with openness. These concepts appear in my research on open knowledge, yet they also hold significance for me as an individual who leans into ‘openness’ in a much broader sense.
My writing, here, builds on my previous blog post ‘Building and governing for access in disruption: Open publishing, disability culture, and library leadership,’ which looked at parallels between disability and open publishing, and the significance of relational and reciprocal processes.
Like previous writing, parts of this are unresolved, but I value the ongoing dialogue that it creates across my work.
Care and objectification
So, it’s with the backdrop of my previous blog post that I return to my writing on care ethics. I’ve started considering who gets to be recognised (their reputation benefits) and who gains agency and influence (they are empowered) when we’re giving/receiving care or support.
Such questions are related to those Moore (2025, p. 10) asks of open knowledge, such as who shapes and controls openness, and with what conditions and values. These are, in essence, questions about power relations and our forms of governance around care and knowledge production. These are also questions that intersect with symbolic capital (prestige and recognition).
I’ll address symbolic capital further along, and its connection to the topic of care is worth noting. A critical disability lens recognises the potential for harmful power dynamics in care, where benevolence may provide recognition and reputational benefits (symbolic capital) for the ‘helper’ while marginalising the person being helped.
We often assume care is a universal good. Yet, when our caring focuses on the unidirectional act of ‘doing for’ or ‘deciding about’ (without mutuality that supports such an arrangement), there is a risk that individuals are positioned not only as an ‘object of support’ but also as an ‘object of care.’
And it’s not the concepts of ‘support’ or ‘care’ on their own that are necessarily concerning here, but rather the risk of objectification.
Objectification disregards individual complexity and autonomy and, in disability contexts, it “serve[s] the moral convenience of non-disabled individuals” as a form of benevolent ableism (Dan, 2024, p. 276). It is well-intentioned, but it is marginalising all the same. 1
While I speak a lot about applying an ethics of care in library and open knowledge work, there are extensive critiques of care ethics within disability spaces that need to be acknowledged as well. Such critiques touch on the paternalistic and ‘dark’ side of care, where it becomes an exercise of power. Critiques of care ethics recognise that the act of care (even out of kindness) has the potential to disempower or objectify disabled people, or to be experienced as unwanted interference (Herring, 2014).
Given these paternalistic narratives, care cannot be an assumed good. However, there is also the risk that, in our critiques of care, we end up privileging norms of independence over interdependence (Herring, 2014). As such, more nuanced understandings have developed. These understandings of care (1) refuse an either/or approach between rights-based (justice) ethics and care ethics, or (2) they recognise care not as a definitive position (carer and cared for) but as a relationship (we show care reciprocally and vulnerability is universal) (Herring, 2014).
This focus on interdependence remains important, as pressure is often placed on disabled people to be seen as self-reliant (independent) and lacking vulnerability (Herring, 2014, The Benefits of Vulnerability section). That is, to be ‘normal.’
Theorising vulnerability
While “vulnerability may be conceptualised as fragility and (or) weakness … it could also be conceptualised as openness, susceptibility, and receptiveness” (Wiles, 2011, p. 579). This is openness and receptiveness to receiving care, to understanding ourselves and one another, and to experiencing unchosen and unforeseen circumstances. In this sense, vulnerability can be valued as an inherent and universal part of the human condition and need not be overcome.
The connection between vulnerability and openness is an uncomfortable one in many spaces, and even vulnerability can be understood in different ways. However, understanding the conditions under which knowledge production presents with qualities such as vulnerability and receptivity is important.
In research communities, vulnerability is discussed in the context of networked participatory scholarship and disclosures as networked scholars. However, beyond this, vulnerability in open access is mostly theorised in the context of equity for ‘vulnerable groups.’ Yet, this situated, group understanding of vulnerability is set against universal understandings. For example, bringing a feminist legl perspective, Martha Fineman ascribes vulnerability and dependency as universal and constant conditions, rather than being limited to specific groups.
Vulnerability in the context of particular marginalised groups is, of course, still important to recognise when considering equity in knowledge production and access. And, perhaps, a parallel in the disability context is how sharing one’s access needs can be a vulnerable process that involves interdependencies and power asymmetries.
However, we are left with the question: to what extent is vulnerability (in knowledge production and access) particular, universal, or socially constructed?
Vulnerability in access to knowledge also matters when it comes to symbolic capital (just like care ethics). Those with greater access to capital can influence participation in, the barriers to, and the legitimacy of knowledge production. 2
As such, a politics of vulnerability in open access requires greater theorisation and nuance. I have only touched lightly on it here. Ideally, the stigma associated with vulnerability can be reduced along with its disproportionate impact. Theorisation of vulnerability, however, also needs to recognise the tensions between universal and particular models.
Affective qualities of openness
It’s difficult to consider vulnerability without also considering the affective qualities it brings (that is, the ways it relates to feeling and emotions). We can find similar conversations about open access, particularly when we talk about relationships (or relationality).
Moore (2025, p. 28), drawing on work by Fitzpatrick and Pinfield, describes how openness can have affective qualities. In discussing epistemic, participatory, and receptive forms of openness, openness is conceived not only as a definitional state (an end goal, distinct from closedness) but as a shared way of being (a relational process, with care).
I’ve had a few research conversations about participatory forms of openness, beyond research outputs. In those conversations, openness was connected to relational governance (as opposed to hierarchical governance). Here, open knowledge was understood in terms of its development and production, not just its outputs. Openness was being tied to the participation of those affected, and conceived as a participatory process, not just in name, but in who might be included and how knowledge production would be governed. 3
The collective nature of concepts like participatory openness and relational governance means that they aren’t without conflict. But to me, the messy, relational ways openness can occur feel similar to the complexity of how care is conceived and experienced in disability contexts.
And I often appreciate sitting with that messiness and complexity. It’s delightfully human.
Collapsing the personal and professional
Over time, my own scholarship has also become more open and public. I’m sharing in ways that allow further sharing, contributions, and commentary from colleagues. And often my sharing (as a process) is in ways that collapse the boundaries between the personal and professional.
Even many of my personal reflections end up being open, reflexive contemplations structured by scholarly analysis. However, that openness comes with vulnerability at times.
I’ve considered how, in professional spaces, including leadership, I’ve become more accustomed to sharing about disability and neurodivergence openly. It is not always with an expectation of a specific outcome, but as a relational practice and process. While I still find it daunting and in some spaces choose not to share, the self-determined nature of my openness means I have agency.
For me, openness has meant balancing risk-taking vis-à-vis symbolic capital (prestige and recognition) with building social capital (networked trust and reciprocity), while retaining agency (independent decision making).
This balance, in effect, calibrates the level of vulnerability in my openness. And it is a calibration dependent on whether openness and vulnerability are viewed as legitimate in different systems, and how that impacts capital.
Symbolic capital and care in knowledge hierarchies
Symbolic capital remains a constant in our professional and academic lives. In academia, symbolic capital is tied to the prestige of publishing opportunities. And, when it comes to open scholarship, as Devraj and Ghosh (2025) describe:
“Open-access platforms, however liberating they might seem, are still caught up in those networks. They are governed by algorithms and institutional hierarchies, and their digital infrastructures are subject to definitive rules of visibility and legitimacy” (p. 1056).
Here, legitimacy (and legitimised knowledge) is a product of the symbolic capital that is associated with prestigious publishing (2025, p. 1059). Such a prestige economy reproduces the institutional and knowledge hierarchies that co-opt openness, in which openness still supports extractive and dominant knowledge systems globally.
However, we do see feminist care ethics applied in open scholarship contexts, bringing relational, collaborative, and equitable perspectives into focus as an alternative to traditional publishing hierarchies.
And just as “care-full commoning” has been proposed in open access publishing, we can find ‘care-full’ approaches to climate justice that centre disability knowledges. This ties into my focus on open climate scholarship in my research.
With critical disability perspectives, there is an acknowledgement of the complexities and harms associated with care for disability communities. Histories of harm define distinct risks, opportunities, power asymmetries, and ways of being in relation with each other that are not realised through a feminist ethics alone.
As such, just as in disability contexts, where paternalistic approaches to care can create inequitable power dynamics, there is a risk that our approaches to open knowledge governance reproduce the power structures and prestige economies we critique.
It is here that a politics of care, vulnerability, and capital converge in open scholarship, and where critical disability theorising acts as a lens for openness.
- See also Hostile, Benevolent, and Ambivalent Ableism: Contemporary Manifestations by Redmond et al. (2019). ↩︎
- See scholarship on epistemic injustice. ↩︎
- A problem Moore (2025, p.32, p. 39) identifies with some open access projects. ↩︎