The Social Justice Collaboratorium: Illuminating Research Pathways between Social Justice and Library and Information Studies

2016 ◽  
pp. 303-327
Author(s):  
RaShauna Brannon ◽  
LaVerne Gray ◽  
Miraida Morales ◽  
Myrna E. Morales ◽  
Mario H. Ramírez ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
The Social ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies

Towards an Archival Critique: Opening Possibilities for Addressing Neoliberalism in the Archival Field

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marika Cifor ◽  
Jamie A. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Ethical Practice ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Contemporary Life

Neoliberalism, as economic doctrine, as political practice, and even as a "governing rationality" of contemporary life and work, has been encroaching on the library and information studies (LIS) field for decades. The shift towards a conscious grappling with social justice and human rights debates and concerns in archival studies scholarship and practice since the 1990s opens the possibility for addressing neoliberalism and its elusive presence. Despite its far-reaching influence, neoliberalism has yet to be substantively addressed in archival discourse. In this article, we propose a set of questions for archival practitioners and scholars to reflect on and consider through their own hands-on practices, research, and productions with records, records creators, and distinct archival communities in order to develop an ongoing archival critique. The goal of this critique is to move towards "an ethical practice of community, as an important mode of participation." This article marks a starting point for critically engaging the archival studies discipline along with the LIS field more broadly by interrogating the discursive and material evidences and implications of neoliberalism.

scholarly journals Systematic Reviews in Theory and Practice for Library and Information Studies

2012 ◽  
Vol 36 (112) ◽  
pp. 6-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue F Phelps ◽  
Nicole Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Systematic Review ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Systematic Reviews ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Specific Question ◽  
The Social ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Care Field

This article is about the use of systematic reviews as a research methodology in library and information studies (LIS). A systematic review is an attempt to gather all of the research on a given topic in order to answer a specific question. They have been used extensively in the health care field and have more recently found their way into the social sciences, including librarianship. Examples of the use of systematic reviews in LIS illustrate the benefits and challenges to using this methodology. Included is a brief description of how to conduct a review and a reading list for further information.

scholarly journals Participant-driven photo-elicitation in library settings: A methodological discussion

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (125) ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
Shailoo Bedi ◽  
Jenaya Webb
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Photo Elicitation ◽  
Research Experiences ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Library Research ◽  
The Social ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Insight Into ◽  
Productive Method

With the current attention in libraries on user-focused services and spaces, there is an increased interest in qualitative research methods that can provide insight into users’ experiences. In this paper, we advance photo-elicitation—a research method that employs photographs in interviews—as one such method. Although widely used in the social sciences, photo-elicitation has seen comparatively little uptake in Library and Information Studies (LIS). Here, we provide an overview of the method, consider epistemological and theoretical approaches, discuss cases of its application in library contexts and examine the benefits of using photo-elicitation for LIS research. We draw on our own research experiences and argue that photo-elicitation is a productive method for learning about the lived experiences of our users and for creating a collaborative approach to library research.

Becoming-Infrastructure: Datafication, Deactivation and the Social Credit System

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramon Salim Diab
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Data Sources ◽  
Causal Powers ◽  
Credit System ◽  
Social Credit ◽  
Information Infrastructures ◽  
The Social ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Data Flows

How might critical library and information studies analyze the intersection of information infrastructure and class structure? The emergence of big data through "datafication" rests on the historical process of information and communication technology (ICT) production and distribution. This paper explores the concept of datafication as an integrated component of information infrastructures unfolding within the class structures of capitalism. A critical realist perspective on relational sociology is offered to illustrate how heterogenous data sources are combined and configured to activate materials and bodies into new internal economic class relations of control. My analysis of datafication therefore moves beyond isolated conceptions of "information" and toward the capacity of distributed data sources to extend and deepen class structures. Two recent large scale cases of datafication are analyzed to highlight its causal powers within class structured society. The first case is drawn from a New York Times article concerning the subprime automobile loan market in the United States. The article details the installation of surveillance technologies into the vehicles of people segmented by low credit scores as a condition of exchange for subprime loans. As a result of this exchange, surveillance technologies capture borrower's driving behaviors and locations in real-time data flows. These data flows are analyzed according to interest bearing payment regimes, rendering both vehicle and borrower as manageable assets while conferring onto lenders the power of remote automobile deactivation. This suggests datafication of driving behaviour produces new implications for class conditions when such data are integrated with the structures of the subprime market. The second case detailed in several news articles examines the plan for a large scale top-down cybernetic behavioural programming initiative by the Chinese government termed the "social credit system," built from digital traces of multiple economic and non-economic social behaviours of its citizens. While aspects of this system are currently voluntary, they are expected to become mandatory within five years. Ubiquitous surveillance of digital activity never before combined into a predictive and prescriptive score may be considered a nation-wide disciplinary subsumption of social activity under novel valuation algorithms, integrating previously unwatched or irrelevant external activities into new internal relations determinative of class structured possibilities. The plan for a social credit system appears driven toward developing a seamlessly interconnected national behavioural identity for every Chinese citizen, which may produce structural implications for pre-existing class conditions. I suggest these cases are examples of the need for library and information studies to engage critically with the emerging causal powers of information infrastructures theorized here as deepening capitalism's control of class structures.

scholarly journals Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access, edited by Ulrich Herb and Joachim Schöpfel

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 36
Author(s):  
Samuel Edge
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Open Access ◽  
Staff Time ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Document Delivery ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Personal Level

Open access is frequently a topic of conversation in library and information studies courses. Usually imbued with hints of social justice, progressivism, and equality, professors and students alike often point to open access as something that librarianship “got right.” On a personal level, while working with document delivery in a large biomedical library, I became an enthusiastic supporter of open access articles and journals that allowed me to save staff time and deliver content to our patrons more expeditiously. After reading Open Divide: Critical Studies on Open Access, my relationship with open access is no longer quite so simple. Open Divide lays the concept of open access bare, making note of its benefits, but also clearly exposing its flaws, faults, and corruptions.

Developing Information and Library Theory for a Conflicted Paradigm World

Libri ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bill Crowley
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Value Of Information ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
English Language ◽  
Theory Development ◽  
Multiple Modernities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThis essay examines theory development for local, national, and international information and library programs facing service issues involving the religious beliefs of users. Applying both culturally pragmatic and secular standpoints, the author identifies a relative lack of attention paid to such issues in the English language literatures of North American and European library and information studies (LIS). In contrast, secular theorists throughout the social sciences, as well as other fields and disciplines, are increasingly engaging with the impact of denominational and personal religious phenomena on nations and their cultures. To address this deficit in LIS theory, the essay asserts the value of information, knowledge, and library scholars drawing on understandings of the deep structures of cultures and multiple modernities, specifically including religious modernities. Further, the essay offers suggestions for secular academics and other investigators in developing the research and theory appropriate for advising LIS practitioners who are providing services which take into account the religious beliefs of the users.

Bologna, My Love: Il Cinema Ritrovato

2019 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-79
Author(s):  
Carla Marcantonio
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Fairy Tale ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Francis Ford Coppola ◽  
The Social ◽  
Ongoing Project

FQ books editor Carla Marcantonio guides readers through the 33rd edition of Il Cinema Ritrovato Festival held each year in Bologna at the end of June. Highlights of this year's festival included a restoration of one of Vittorio De Sica's hard-to-find and hence lesser-known films, the social justice fairy tale, Miracolo a Milano (Miracle in Milan, 1951). The film was presented by De Sica's daughter, Emi De Sica, and was an example of the ongoing project to restore De Sica's archive, which was given to the Cineteca de Bologna in 2016. Marcantonio also notes her unexpected responses to certain reviewings; Apocalypse Now: Final Cut (2019), presented by Francis Ford Coppola on the large-scale screen of Piazza Maggiore and accompanied by remastered Dolby Atmos sound, struck her as a tour-de-force while a restoration of David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) had lost some of its strange allure.

On "Diversity" as Anti-Racism in Library and Information Studies: A Critique

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
David James Hudson
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Competence ◽  
Dominant Mode ◽  
Specific Exercise ◽  
Critical Information ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Library Studies ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Diversity Discourse

Drawing on a range of critical race and anti-colonial writing, and focusing chiefly on Anglo-Western contexts of librarianship, this paper offers a broad critique of diversity as the dominant mode of anti-racism in LIS. After outlining diversity's core tenets, I examine the ways in which the paradigm's centering of inclusion as a core anti-racist strategy has tended to inhibit meaningful treatment of racism as a structural phenomenon. Situating LIS diversity as a liberal anti-racism, I then turn to diversity's tendency to privilege individualist narratives of (anti-)racism, particularly narratives of cultural competence, and the intersection of such individualism with broader structures of political-economic domination. Diversity's preoccupation with demographic inclusion and individual behavioural competence has, I contend, left little room in the field for substantive engagement with race as a historically contingent phenomenon: race is ultimately reified through LIS diversity discourse, effectively precluding exploration of the ways in which racial formations are differentially produced in the contextually-specific exercise of power itself. I argue that an LIS foregrounding of race as a historical construct - the assumption of its contingency - would enable deeper inquiry into the complex ways in which our field - and indeed the diversity paradigm specifically - aligns with the operations of contemporary regimes of racial subordination in the first place. I conclude with a reflection on the importance of the Journal of Critical Information and Library Studies as a potential site of critical exchange from which to articulate a sustained critique of race in and through our field.

Minting the Obverse: Library and Information Studies as a One-Sided Coin

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Gorichanaz
Keyword(s):  
Professional Education ◽  
Liberal Arts ◽  
Academic Research ◽  
Human Knowledge ◽  
Research Department ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
Key Concepts

A synthesis of the work of Michael Buckland reveals the critique that, for too long, LIS has been a one-sided coin. Growing out of professional education, LIS has traditionally nurtured only its applied, practical and empirical side. Challenging this imbalance, emerging research in LIS points to the development of the basic, liberal arts and conceptual side of the discipline. Indeed, the advent of JCLIS reflects this trend. An interest in basic LIS is welcome for a number of reasons: By clarifying key concepts, it will lead to improved practice; by contributing more widely to human knowledge it will fulfill the obligations of being an academic research department; and by exploring information issues which are becoming relevant to all members of society, it will realize a greater purpose. This paper surveys the extent to which the basic side of LIS has emerged, examining the content of the top LIS journals and the curricula of the top LIS institutions. The findings point to an inchoate reverse, but one with numerous challenges that remain beyond the horizon. This paper serves as an invitation to researchers and educators to consider how they can further contribute to minting the basic side of the coin of LIS.

Integration of Digital Preservation Knowledge, Skills and Competencies in the Teaching Curricula of Library and Information Studies at the University of Botswana

Mousaion ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thatayaone Segaetsho ◽  
Julie Moloi
Keyword(s):  
Digital Preservation ◽  
Records Management ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
University Of Botswana ◽  
Current Trends ◽  
Teaching Content ◽  
Library And Information Studies ◽  
Information Studies ◽  
The University

In the past few decades, digital technology has found a place in the acquisition, arrangement, description, preservation, and dissemination of information. However, heritage institutions are perturbed by the challenges of digital preservation strategies particularly for education. Despite continuous investment in digital preservation, there are limited skilled professionals to equip learners with the knowledge, skills and competencies required to drive digital preservation in Botswana. Therefore, this paper investigated the knowledge, skills and competencies related to digital preservation in the teaching curricula of the Department of Library and Information Studies (DLIS) at the University of Botswana. Data collection was done through intensive structured interviews with specific educators who teach courses on digital preservation in the archives and records management stream. The study revealed that despite the fact that the educators in preservation courses are aware of current trends in digital preservation, most of them have not obtained formal degree certification specific to digital preservation. The findings further revealed that minimal digital preservation competencies are observed in the teaching curricula. A significant number of challenges observed illustrated mainly a lack of resources and limited skills in terms of practical demonstrations by educators. The curricula mostly lacked clarity on long-term and short-term digital preservation. The study recommends that DLIS and other institutions should conduct surveys or curriculum auditing on digital preservation in order to improve the teaching content. A significant number of shortcomings regarding digital preservation that could motivate further studies are also discussed under the conclusion and recommendations section of this study.

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