This is the text of a talk I gave at UCLA’s Information Studies department back in 2015. I think I meant to someday do something with it, but then I got locked out and the years since have been busy ones. I’m getting my writing back up and running these days, but it’s slower going…
Category: Critical Librarianship
Writing and talks on cataloguing, teaching and the everyday work of libraries.
I had the enormous pleasure of chairing a panel at the OAH conference in Philadelphia last week. Here’s our abstract: I offered some framing of the conversation, which I’m sharing below. Given the structural conditions all of us face, any conversation about the production, organization, preservation, circulation, and meaning-making of “stuff” inside and outside the…
I was honored to give the keynote at at Chelsea College of the Arts this afternoon. Many thanks to Jamie Cawley for the invitation. My remarks are pasted below. I want to start by thanking Jamie Cawley and the event organizers for inviting me to join you here in London to talk about what we…
Karen Nichols and Marion Sealey invited me to write the foreword to their collection The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship, and I said yes before I had thought through what a foreword is for. Thanks to Library Juice Press, the chapters are openly deposited, so the argument is available to anyone…
I was a commenter for a debate about neutrality in libraries. A copy of my talk is pasted below! Clocked in at 8:02–thank goodness for the big bright timer. I wish I had one with me always. By now, the basic arguments for and against neutrality as a library value have been made. I’d like…
I was so pleased to get to attend METRO’s conference on Libraries in the Context of Capitalism. Highlights for me were Rowan Sharif ‘s investigation into “value” and what exactly librarians are reproducing when we reproduce the academy through our work. Dan Greene ‘s talk on librarians and patrons at the Washington D.C. public library…
Poking my head above the mid-semester waters to ask this question: how do we change the table? There are two conversations going on in my world that provoke for me the same question: do we want to find ourselves a seat at the table, or do we want an entirely different table? And if we…
It’s my birthday so my girlfriend took me out to lunch. Over chocolate mousse I asked her what I should do as a 42 year old. Plans? Goals? Intentions? What? Do you want to write a book? Sure. What do you want to write about? Oh man, the loaded question, the one I think about…
Many thanks to librarians of the Hawaii Library Association and Kapiʻolani Community College for inviting me to talk about critical librarianship last week in Honolulu. The talk came at the end of a week of getting my National Parks Passport stamped, something I really enjoy doing and, if I’m honest, was part of the warrant…
I was really loud and angry about initial indications from the American Library Association that the organization would be collaborating with the Trump administration. Like, really really mad. I am equally glad to see the organization signaling shock and dismay at early administration policies aimed at dismantling the state. This is the ALA I want…
I have been very busy in despair and raising an eight year old and fighting for a fair contract and doing the laundry and calling my legislative leaders to tell them to stop just about everything I see getting started, so I missed Tuesday’s press release from the ALA Washington office that proclaimed the Association…
I am proud to have a chapter in Volume One of Kendra McAllen and Noelle Pardo’s two volume set about critical library pedagogy. This is co-authored with Maeve Sutton at the University of Michigan, a collaboration that came about the old fashioned way, sitting across from each other in a circle at the ACRL 2015…
When LIU Brooklyn locked out its faculty, they sent us out onto the sidewalk with all of the skills we use every day to make teaching and learning great in the heart of the Blackbird Nation. As we use these skills to organize effectively against them, it is clear that they have made a critical…
I just got back from my four mile run, the first four miles in a 38 mile week. We’re just nine weeks out from the New York City Marathon. I have been training for fifteen weeks so far. My dad drove out from Boise to watch me run this race in 2015. Six weeks later,…
The #liulockout has so far meant many things, and many of those have to do with affect, something I might write about in a theoretical way if I was currently being paid to be a scholar and a teacher, but instead am experiencing acutely right now. This is terrifying. We talk a lot about privilege…
Implementing this lockout must be costing the university an awful lot of money. They had to advertise for, recruit, hire, and process paperwork for a ton of replacement workers to “deliver services” in our classrooms. They had to give all these scab hires ID cards and give them tours of the library. They calculated individual…
Long Island University, Brooklyn faculty will be locked out by management as of 12:01am September 3rd, in other words, late Friday night. This is an aggressive act against the membership by management, and it is equal parts enraging, terrifying, and sad. It feels like a betrayal, really, and worse than thing felt when we went…
Many thanks to the team at UBC libraries and WILU 2016 for inviting me to present the keynote address at this spring’s conference. The theme of the conference was “intersections,” which resonates on many levels including the politics of identity and the politics of space. I chose to talk about the ways that librarians intersect…
I was thrilled to be asked to talk about my work with Radical Teacher for the SPARC/ACRL Forum this year. The theme was “Flipping to Open,” and I really loved hearing from Dorian Fenn about the impact of going open on College & Research Libraries. Fenn discussed strategies that C&RL used to increase engagement with…
I had a fantastic time at WILU 2016 in Vancouver, not least because it was in Vancouver. What a beautiful place, and the University of British Columbia campus is exceptionally beautiful. If you know me, you know I’m training to run the New York City marathon, and it was a gift to be able to…
I had a super busy spring schedule of talks, and spent a bunch of it trying to work through my feelings about the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and the Standards for Information Literacy for Higher Education and what these two documents have to tell us about the professional infrastructure of “information literacy.”…
With the ACRL 2017 papers/panels/workshops deadline upon us, I am rushing to figure out if there are any last flourishes I want to put on the few proposals I’m involved with this year and what else I might want to rush into the queue in case I still want to talk about it in a…
Huge thanks to and at Moraine Valley Community College for the invitation to address the Information Literacy Summit last Friday. Theirs was the very first invitation I had ever received to talk to a group of librarians, and when I got the email in the fall I was beyond flattered and also not wholly convinced…
I am back at my desk in Brooklyn after a weekend in Vancouver, British Columbia, staring at my screen and wondering how to get back to the ordinary tasks of my worklife. So I thought I’d write up a few brief reflections on what was, for me, a really wonderful event. I’m going to do…
As someone who works on an open access journal, I have more respect than most for the labor involved in moving a small platform. Congratulations to Naomi Ashford, Daniel Kestler, and the rest of the team at Collaborative Librarianship for their first issue on the Digital Commons platform. And thanks too for the invitation to…
I spent the day in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania with the library workers of the Associated Colleges of Western Pennsylvania at their spring workshop. I gave a talk about queer theory and cataloging and classification, something that I’ve written about and always love talking about. I am grateful to Linnea Sandoval from Albright College and Bram Halloway…
I edit a book series for Library Juice Press/Litwin Books titled Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies. This series publishes works from both practical and theoretical perspectives that critically engage issues in the LIS field related to gender and sexual difference. I am always seeking proposals for single-authored books as well as edited collections related…