AggieOpen Invited Speaker 2025 - Jessie Loyer

Held each year during Open Education Week, the UC Davis Library’s AggieOpen Invited Speaker Series addresses important issues in Open Education and allows speakers to share their research with a broader audience.

Loyer’s talk, “The Agreements that Allow Us to Care for Each Other,” explores the history of Open Access and draw upon histories of caretaking. In this time of rising fascism, white supremacy, and dehumanization, practitioners of open pedagogies can ask ourselves: what agreements have shaped the caring impulse behind our work? How do agreements such as treaty-making between Indigenous nations and nation-states inscribe intergenerational caretaking? How can we learn from our predecessors’ choices to build connections that allow us to survive and thrive?

Loyer considers these questions alongside participants through her scholarship on Indigenous relationality in digital spaces, Open Education, and digital kinship.