“Intercultural Open Resources for Environmental Justice”: AMICAL project accepted for the Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute

AMICAL recently gathered a team to work on a cross-consortium project idea for supporting the development of Open Educational Resources and Open Access scholarship related to environmental issues, in particular environmental justice, with the intercultural lens inherent to AMICAL’s member institutions.

I’m proud to share the news that AMICAL’s team is one of 5 that were accepted for participation in next week’s Triangle Scholarly Communications Institute, a week-long project-incubation workshop funded by the Mellon Foundation and hosted at Duke University. According to the TriangleSCI website, the Institute is “not a traditional conference, but rather a forum for teams of individuals from diverse backgrounds to devote concentrated time to defining shared challenges, exploring creative strategies, and forging new collaborations, in a spirit of bold and open experimentation….”

AMICAL’s project idea, tentatively called “Intercultural Open Resources for Environmental Justice”, is described in detail here. The team members currently helping to develop the idea include:

• Antonio Lopez (Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies, John Cabot University)
• Elena Berg (Associate Professor of Environmental Science, American University of Paris)
• Dalal Rahme (Data Services Librarian, American University of Beirut)
• Nadine Aboulmagd (Senior Instructional Designer, Center for Learning and Teaching, American University in Cairo)
• Fiona Glasgow (Scholarly Communications Librarian, American University of Sharjah)
• Alex Armstrong (Program & Technology Officer, AMICAL Consortium)
• Jeff Gima (AMICAL Consortium Director, American University of Paris)

Aside from the obvious climate change circumstances, requiring urgent efforts by all sectors of society, the project has been motivated in part by:

• Antonio Lopez’s project, ecomedialiteracy.org, a growing collection of OER for teaching about intersections of media literacy and environment-related communications. This has been supported by several AMICAL Small Grants, and it’s been both an inspiration and an exemplar of projects that could be supported by an AMICAL initiative for “Intercultural Open Resources for Environmental Justice”.
• Earlier AMICAL strategic planning work that indicated consortial interest in Open Access scholarship, Open Educational Resources, and sustainability.
• AMICAL’s balance of member institutions and colleagues from the global north and south, giving us a strong basis for working on intercultural & interdisciplinary open resources supporting global environmental justice

The project is in an early planning phase, but we expect to make much progress at TriangleSCI next week and have more news about the project soon. We’ll be reaching out to AMICAL members soon as we gather information about interest and existing resources across the consortium, but if you or colleagues at your member institution are interested in contributing to the project or hearing more about it, you can let us know at contact@amicalnet.org.

Jeff Gima
AMICAL Consortium Director