Open for Climate Justice is the theme of Open Access Week 2022. We address the unequal access to knowledge about the climate crisis between various groups of people and stimulate the sharing of knowledge and collaborations within the global climate movement.

The effects of climate justice have an enormous impact on everyone – but the impacts are 'not be[ing] borne equally or fairly, between rich and poor, women and men, and older and younger generations,' as the UN notes. These imbalances of power affect communities' abilities to produce, disseminate and use knowledge around the climate crisis. Openness can create pathways to more equitable knowledge sharing and serve as a means to address the inequities that shape the impacts of climate change and our response to them.

Sharing knowledge is a human right and a tackling the climate crisis requires the rapid exchange of knowledge across geographic, economic and disciplinary boundaries. 

The VU University Library invites speakers from various fields to illustrate the importance of open access publishing for climate justice. This event is part of the international Open Access Week 2022. 

Agenda

12:00 - 12:15 Grab your FREE lunch and get comfortable

Presentations

12:15 - 12:30 Stephan Okhuijsen: The big step from Open Access to Public Awarenes

12:30 - 12:45 Iris Veerbeek: Democratising literature through Wild Pedagogies: multi-sensory approaches to texts in theology and the humanities

12:45 - 13:00 Sanli Faez: The need of Open Hardware

13:00 - 13: 15 David Rossati: The VU Climate Law Clinic as an initiative of shared legal knowledge for transnational climate justice

13:15 - 13:30 Further discussion

About the speakers

Stephan Okhuijsen

Stephan Okhuijsen is an Information Technology specialist and worked for organisations like the University of Amsterdam, The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, several municipalities and the Netherlands Court of Audit. For more than three years he has been working for the Vrije Universiteit as an IT project manager. Next to making research data findable, accessible, interoperable and re-usable, Okhuijsen also translates data into information. He worked as a data-journalist and was for a long time involved in the Dutch weblog Sargasso and had a data column with RTLZ. In his talk, Stephan Okhuijsen will share his work as Datagraver and go deeper into “The big step from Open Access to Public Awareness".

Iris Veerbeek

Iris Veerbeek MA is theologian and completed her masters Building Interreligious Relations at the Vrije Universiteit. In 2021 she was a junior fellow in the Ethics of the Anthropocene at the VU. Currently she is working on a proposal for her PhD thesis on how communities can contribute to the public debate on ecology and climate change in a post-secular world. Her focus is on shifting from anthropocentric, destructive Western human attitudes towards an eco-centric worldview. Iris is also project coordinator Active and Blended Learning at the Faculty of Religion and Theology and researching new ways of teaching sustainable behaviours in primary education. Veerbeek’s talk addresses the use of “wild pedagogies” in a project called Locusts and Wild Honey for the Amsterdam Sustainability Institute. Wild pedagogies promote the use of human senses in education and encourages an open attitude towards a plurality of life philosophies.  
 

Sanli Faez

Sanli Faez is an assistant professor at the Physics department of Utrecht University.  He is the principal investigator for the research direction nanoElectroPhotonics at the Nanophotonics section of the Debye Institute for Nanomaterials at Utrecht University. He investigates the visualization of tiny movements of single electrons, therefore he developed an optical microscopical method to measure how nanoparticles move. How he amplifies his discipline is as follows, I quote “How do molecules dance and how do I become their choreographer?” He is an alumni of the Utrecht Young Academy and current member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of the initiators of the Klimaathelpdesk, a website where researchers answer diverse questions related to the climate change, and a member of the NWO/KNAW Climate Taskforce, who has written an advice for a new national initiative on climate-related research. He has been the host of the latest series of the HardwareX podcast and two seasons of The Road to Open Science podcast. 

David Rossati

David Rossati is an assistant professor of public international law in the Transnational Legal Studies department of the VU Faculty of Law. He researches and teaches in the area of international climate change law. He is also a pro-bono legal advisor for an NGO supporting least-developed country delegates at the UN climate negotiations and has worked on several projects on governance and regulatory aspects of climate finance and climate-related technologies. Together with dr. Clemens Kaupa, he also directs the VU Climate Law Clinic. This is the first European law clinic that’s dedicated to the promotion of climate justice via legal action. Today he will tell us more about this initiative.

What to expect?

Open for Climate Justice event will feature four short talks from researchers and climate enthusiasts. Each talk will be about 10 minutes long. There will be time for questions, discussion and networking. Don't miss the free lunch at the beginning of the event! Use the registration form at the bottom to indicate your dietary restrictions.

Who should attend?

This event brings together researchers, and data management and data science experts from all subject areas. Early career researchers as well as experienced academics are welcome to attend.

Open Access Week 2022 is an opportunity to join together, take action, and raise awareness around how open can be a means for climate justice.