Understanding Social Justice Through Practitioners’ Language (original) (raw)
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The International Journal of Information, Diversity, and Inclusion, 2021
Researchers have recognized that aspects of social justice are present in library efforts by acknowledging the importance of using library programs and services to promote social justice and the significance of social justice for the LIS field. However, while public libraries have indicated a strong interest in reaching underserved communities, they may not yet possess a thorough understanding of various aspects of social justice, especially the concepts of equity, engagement, and empowerment, despite the increasing focus on social justice’s centrality in the library science field. This work-in progress study presents a grounded theory analysis of 20 semistructured interviews that were conducted as part of an existing study with library staff and their community partners (staff who work at organizations with which the libraries partner to offer outreach programs in the community). The analysis explores and unpacks practitioners’ language to demonstrate a complex, multifaceted portrait of how these practitioners describe equity, engagement, and empowerment. These practitioners express both broad and individual approaches to this social justice work in an effort to offer equal treatment to the whole community while also recognizing individual barriers. Moreover, they underscore the importance of a role for the community to play in achieving their own goals and strengthening connections between community members and institutions. This analysis yields a critical semantic foundation of social justice concepts, situated in practitioner understanding and prior research in social justice.
The Academic Library and Social Justice: A Q-Study of Librarian Attitudes
2016
This study took place on the campus of a Hispanic-serving institution, and used Q methodology to assess the attitudes and perceptions of academic librarians toward a social justice role for the university library. Among librarians and others in higher education, there is a great deal of confusion around social justice as a concept because over the past forty years, it has often been subsumed under, or diverted by the neoliberal discourse of multicultural education, which conflates social justice with providing equal opportunities for under-represented students primarily as a means of enabling them to obtain jobs and become consumers in our neoliberal capitalist society. Unfortunately, this perspective dovetails neatly with the positivist traditions of the library profession, which also eschews political involvement and exhorts librarians to remain neutral in the services and collections they provide. Within this discourse, universities and their libraries are stripped of their political and social potential for addressing the structural problems and inequalities which circumscribe the lives of the very students they purport to serve. The results of this study indicate that many librarians believe that their profession's ethos of neutrality renders the debate over social justice within the library moot. These librarians equate social justice as equivalent to giving equal access to materials that promote the advancement of marginalized groups, and to those that encourage the continuation of the status quo or opposition to equality. Only a small number of librarians envision themselves as well iv positioned to promote social justice by empowering students to use the resources currently available within the library. Despite the different viewpoints represented by the factors uncovered in this study, there did emerge areas of consensus from which library leaders can mediate conversations aimed at uncovering and evaluating the principles, practices, and attitudes within the library that arise from the dominant White worldview and hinder the library's ability to serve all students equitably. Conversations about topics such as those implicated in this study, including institutional racism, diversity, social justice, and White privilege are not always comfortable conversations, but they are required if the library is to enact the changes necessary to allow it to serve all students more effectively and more justly. These discussions are especially needed at this time, when academic librarians as a profession remain 86 percent White, while many of our campuses are becoming increasingly racially diverse. If the library is to retain its place as the center of social and political discourse within the university, it is critical that it fully represent and respect the perspectives of non-dominant groups and recognize alternative epistemologies. Breaking with the positivist traditions of the library will allow opportunities for librarians to authentically connect with more of our students, which is particularly needed at Hispanic-serving institutions. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the faculty of California State University, San Bernardino and my fellow Cohort Eight doctoral students for their support and encouragement. I am particularly indebted to the members of my Committee, including my Committee Chair, Dr. John Winslade, along with Dr. Edna Martinez, and Dr. Doris Wilson, for making this journey a smooth one. Special thanks are also due to Dr. Marita Mahoney for providing consultation and guidance on data analysis. vi
Public Libraries Through a Social Justice Lens
2019
Libraries have historically served different purposes and clientele — whether as places for storing archival material, for displaying private collections of curiosities, and for accessing leisure, knowledge, and so much more. From antiquity to the renaissance and the enlightenment age until today, public library services are often a reflection of the communities they serve, but grosso modo, they exist to provide information access to all. However we know this not to be the case in practice. In a study looking at accessibility to diverse populations in Leeds, U.K. public libraries, researchers found that, in general, public libraries portend to be “open to all” but their “service priorities and resourcing strategies [...] work in favor of existing library users rather than excluded or disadvantaged communities or groups” (Linley, et al, 2001, p. 11). This notion of access to all is one that needs to be studied more closely and in context with communities of traditionally marginalized groups of people in which those libraries are embedded. Drawing on the core values of equity cited by the ALA, Buschman and Warner state that reducing inequities needs to be part of a “sustained, profession-wide campaign that can only be led by the ALA” (2016, p. 161). This paper argues that social justice needs to be defined explicitly, and be integrated in the fabric of the profession in every facet of librarianship – through collections management, governance, programming, hiring practices, outreach, information systems and technology, research, information literacy, cataloguing and classification, preservation, and reference services. Public libraries in Canada are institutions governed by provincial and municipal legal frameworks (guided by internal policies and procedures) but as public institutions they should also be reflective of the local communities they serve.
The Academic Library and Social Justice: Exploring Librarian Attitudes at One HSI
Journal of Hispanic Higher Education, 2019
Librarians have the potential to influence the university’s representation of knowledge, making it important to understand the attitudes they bring to work each day. Results of this Q study indicate librarians may believe their profession’s ethos of neutrality renders debate over social justice within the library moot. Only a small number of librarians at this Hispanic-serving institution envision themselves positioned to promote social justice by empowering students to use the resources currently available within the library.
Equity on the Ground: Promoting Social Justice in a Library Staff Reading Group
The Serials Librarian, 2020
The Access Services Department at the University of California Berkeley's Main Library recently implemented a social justice-focused reading group for library employees. Inspired by the UCSB Critlib project, the group was developed as a pilot to be replicated by other departments and libraries interested in incorporating a social justice mindset into their daily operations. This article details the preparation, implementation, and evaluation processes of the group's first meeting. Recommendations and best practices for starting a social justice-focused reading group in a library setting are included in the discussion. This project was designed during a graduatelevel course at the University of Washington iSchool.
Social Justice as Strategy: Connecting School Libraries, Collaboration, and IT
This article examines perceptions of social justice among a set of students undertaking a group research task in a New Jersey high school library. The purpose was for students to produce a coconstructed product that represented the negotiated understanding of their curriculum topic. The study involved 42 grade nine students in a language arts class focused on independent reading tasks emphasizing critical/reflective thinking, speaking, and independent learning skills as well as the effective use of research/knowledge construction strategies. The study used open- ended reflections and an asynchronous Google Docs–based environment to capture perceptions of the students’ collaborative processes and to examine collaborative knowledge-building dy- namics and outcomes. This article proposes an action-level typology that maps the collective strategies used by students to negotiate socially just conditions during the collaborative process. The study also provides suggestions for and a methodological example of how social justice principles can be examined in information-intensive organizations.
Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 2022
This article details the findings from Project LOCAL (Library Outreach as a Community Anchor in Learning),a mixed-methods study that explored how public libraries contribute to educational equity by going into community locations to reach and serve families and children in underserved communities who cannot come into the library due to a variety of barriers. The data revealed four main aspects to this outreach work: program types, locations, goals, and partnerships. Public libraries offer a variety of program types – literacy programs, summer meal programs, STEAM programs – in various locations, like schools, shelters, housing developments, barbershops, and others. These programs and services are developed with an array of goals in mind, broadly categorized as related to access, advocacy, and impact, to serve a variety of underserved communities. Furthermore, libraries are forming complex, fruitful partnerships with different community organizations to build trust, relationships, and goodwill in these communities. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model of human development provides a lens for situating these four aspects within the various environmental systems in families’ lives and reveals how, through outreach work, librarians are moving from outer, less visible systems to more central ones that reinforce their relevance and importance in the lives of families in underserved communities.
2017
An array of socio-political changes around the globe have stirred debate and discussion on questions of exclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged groups and ways of eliminating this imbalance through policy interventions . The question of just social representation has come centre stage “due to increasing social unrest and quest for understanding patterns of social representation and strategies for inclusive public policies have exploded around the world marked by an upsurge of interest in strategies of inclusion ranging from different kind affirmative actions, more inclusive representations and creating a institutionalized mechanism that addresses the needs of various marginalized groups on the basis of race, religion and ethnic backgrounds. The overall purpose of paper is to examine as to whether libraries can reposition themselves as nerve centres of community engagements by building capacities of common masses so as to partner with public policy programme for building an inclu...
Comminfolit, 2017
Since the publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries' (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education librarians have grappled with the purposes, impact, and meaning of this teaching document for their daily instructional practice, for curriculum development, and for institutional and programmatic assessment goals. A strength of the Framework is its emphasis on context, an emphasis aligned with the goals of critical pedagogy and one that acknowledges investment in specific community needs. This article reflects on an attempt to contextualize the Framework for an information literacy program concerned with social justice and student agency by connecting it with the American Library Association's (ALA) Core Values of Librarianship. Specifically, the authors mapped the Core Values of Librarianship, such as democracy, diversity, the public good, and social responsibility, to the ACRL Framework as a means to put into instructional practice our values as librarians.
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