Cindy Pallares Quezada
When Free Culture isn't Free: The Price of Cultural Appropriation on Communities of Color
When we speak about free and open source and culture, we often speak about the ability to share, modify, and distribute content. The socially and economically privileged, however, have often used the free exchange of ideas to create a great deal of profit, continually taking from those with little social or economic power without permission or acknowledgment.
These appropriated ideas are reduced to commodities and stripped of their cultural roots, which are deemed inferior. In this talk, we will discuss some pitfalls in the discourse around free culture, understand the difference between authentic cultural exchange and appropriation, and discuss the steps we can do to acknowledge and prevent cultural appropriation.
Speaker Bio
Cindy Pallares is a student, activist, part-time Red Hatter, and member of Free Culture Foundation. She is passionate about free software and free culture and spends her time doing outreach and volunteering to get more people involved in open source software.