Book Selections

"This book will contribute to the discourse on ways of increasing anti-racism, empowerment, and representation in the LIS field and beyond. It continues in the civil rights legacy of African American librarian pioneers including Dr. E.J. Josey, Dr. Virginia Lacy Jones, Dr. Carla Hayden, and Dr. Eliza Atkins Gleason"--

"Black and Queer on Campus is a ground-breaking account of queer Black experiences on college campuses, based on 65 interviews with Black LGBTQ students"--

"Following the killing of George Floyd in 2020, a moral panic gripped the US and UK. To atone for an alleged history of racism, statues were torn down and symbols of national identity attacked. Across universities, fringe theories became the new orthodoxy, with a cadre of activists backed by university technocrats adopting a binary worldview of moral certainty, sin and deconstructive redemption through Western self-erasure. This hard-hitting book surveys these developments for the first time. It unpacks and challenges the theories and arguments deployed by 'decolonizers' in a university system now characterized by garbled leadership and illiberal groupthink. The desire to question the West's sense of itself, deconstruct its narratives, and overthrow its institutional order is an impulse that, ironically, was underpinned by a more confident and assured Western hegemony, which is now waning and under great strain. If its light continues to dim, who or what will carry the torch for human freedom and progress?"

"Confronting White Nationalism in Libraries is a resource by and for library workers to use when bigoted groups try to organize in our communities. We believe that sharing common experiences can shed light on the truth and promote learning. Through actual scenarios that our libraries have encountered, we suggest ways in which library workers can use tools we already have at our disposal to resist white nationalism - whatever our position in the library. There is a significant body of literature addressing racism in libraries (and this toolkit is part of that overall work), but the toolkit's specific focus is on responding to the social movement of white nationalism through our library work."--Page 4

"Librarianship has been conceptualized as a vocation or calling--rather than a profession--since the 1800s. Within this historical context, librarians are encouraged to think of ourselves as possessing a natural disposition to showing perpetual engagement, enthusiasm, and self-regulation in pursuit of our shared vocation. These assumptions about the profession can sometimes shield us from introspective criticism, but they can also prevent us from recognizing and managing the systemic occupational issues that afflict us. Academic Librarian Burnout can help librarians develop the agency to challenge the assumptions and practices that have led to so much professional burnout. In five thorough parts, it offers ways to discuss burnout in our work environments, studies burnout's nature and causes, and provides preventative intervention and mitigation strategies: Reframing Burnout; Conditions that Promote Burnout; Lived Experiences; Individual Responses to Burnout; and Organizational Responses to Burnout. Chapters explore the relationship of burnout in academic libraries and illness, intersectionality, workload, managerial approaches, and more, while offering real-life stories and ways for both individuals and organizations to address the symptoms and causes of burnout. The emotional, physical, and mental investment we require of librarianship--to go above and beyond to serve the ever--evolving needs of our patrons while perennially justifying our existence to library stakeholders-can come at the expense of our well-being. Academic Librarian Burnout addresses unsustainable work environments and preserves and celebrates the unique contributions of librarians"--

Libraries are increasingly on the frontlines of defending democracy, and resisting growing efforts to disrupt LGBTQ+ programming, ban books focused on inclusivity, and attack critical race theory. Western States Center’s toolkit gives librarians, administrators and communities the tools needed to effectively push back against these efforts. Written by and for librarians in collaboration with Western States Center, this toolkit is organized around six realistic scenarios, highlighting proactive and reactive practices for taking action along with communications approaches. The toolkit is part of the Western States Center’s ongoing efforts to strengthen those on the frontlines of defending democracy against white nationalism, especially in public institutions like schools and local governments that often need support.

The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, Revisions, and New Works collects expanded and updated presentations given at the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS) held biennially at the University of Arizona Libraries. This anthology provides a toolkit for critical library pedagogy that recognizes how knowledge is created within historical and deeply politicized contexts. Authors working in library or disciplinary teaching.

"This book provides advice and support to help library employees best deal with sexually harassing patrons, unruly groups of students, gang members, thieves, Internet hogs, and others who can disrupt the safe library environment"--

"Neurodiversity in the Workplace presents a timely and needed perspective on the role and responsibility of employers, and those working to increase the effectiveness of workplace practices, to examine the many ways we preclude large segments of the population from employment and how we can create opportunities for building a truly inclusive work environment"--

"LIS educators and students, library directors, managers, frontline employees, and those who work behind the scenes all share how they are taking action and creating change. Thoughtfully addressing DEI issues related to policies, services, and programs, this collection's diverse chorus of voices will both enlighten and inspire. Cultural humility offers a renewing and transformative framework for navigating interpersonal interactions in libraries, whether between patrons and staff or staff members with one another. It foregrounds a practice of critical self-reflection and commitment to recognizing and redressing structural inequities and problematic power imbalances. This collection, the first book-length treatment of this approach in libraries, gathers contributors from across the field to demonstrate how cultural humility can change the way we work and make lasting impacts on diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries." --;"This collection gathers contributors from across the field to demonstrate how cultural humility can change the way we work and make lasting impacts on diversity, equity, and inclusion in libraries"--

Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership makes explicit the ways in which a grounding in feminist theory and practice impacts the work of library administrators who identify as feminists. Recent scholarship by LIS researchers and practitioners on the intersections of gender with sexuality, race, class, and other social categories within libraries and other information environments have highlighted the need and desire of this community to engage with these concepts both in theory and praxis. Feminists Among Us adds to this conversation by focusing on a subset of feminist LIS professionals and researchers in leadership roles who engage critically with both management work and librarianship. By collecting these often implicit professional acts, interactions, and dynamics and naming them as explicitly feminist, these accounts both document aspects of an existing community of practice as well as invite fellow feminists, advocates, and resisters to consider library leadership as a career path. -- from back cover.

"Explores the experiences of women of color in library and information science (LIS), using intersectionality as a framework"--

It is a book all LIS educators and administrators need to read now. The editors and author contributors show us by direct action what critical librarianship is. At the heart of the book is an ethics of care and self-care, an ethics born out of critical stances positioned in examining our rich intersectionalities and inter-being as people of color and allies. Librarians With Spines is a call to action that asks us to reflect on our intentionality as information professionals. It challenges librarians to proudly uphold and carry forward our duty to serve our communities in our daily work.

"This book provides librarians and those studying to enter the profession with tools to grapple with their own implication within systems of policing and incarceration, melding critical theory with real-world examples to demonstrate how to effectively serve people impacted by incarceration"--

Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. Politics. Philosophy & Critical Theory. Introduction by Jack Halberstam. In this series of essays, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney draw on the theory and practice of the black radical tradition as it supports, inspires, and extends contemporary social and political thought and aesthetic critique. Today the general wealth of social life finds itself confronted by mutations in the mechanisms of control: the proliferation of capitalist logistics, governance by credit, and the management of pedagogy. Working from and within the social poesis of life in THE UNDERCOMMONS, Moten and Harney develop and expand an array of concepts: study, debt, surround, planning, and the shipped. On the fugitive path of an historical and global blackness, the essays in this volume unsettle and invite the reader to the self-organised ensembles of social life that are launched every day and every night amid the general antagonism of THE UNDERCOMMONS.

"This book provides library workers with the tools they need to provide excellent customer service and a safe environment to all patrons regardless of ability"--

"Microsoft's associate general counsel shares the inspirational story of his rise from childhood poverty in pre-gentrified New York City to a stellar career at the top of the technology and music industries in this stirring true story of grit and perseverance. For fans of Indra Nooyi's My Life in Full and Viola Davis's Finding Me"--

Presenting the fierce and vital writing of organizers, lawyers, scholars, poets, and policy makers, this book radically repositions the antiviolence movement by putting women of color at its center. The contributors shift the focus from domestic violence and sexual assault and map innovative strategies of movement building and resistance used by women of color around the world. The volume's thirty pieces - which include poems, short essays, position papers, letters, and personal reflections - cover violence against women of color in its myriad forms, manifestations, and settings, while identifying the links between gender, militarism, reproductive and economic violence, prisons and policing, colonialism, and war. -- Provided by publisher.

Exploring the diverse terrain that makes up library and information science (LIS), this collection features the work of scholars, practitioners, and others who draw from a variety of theoretical approaches to name, problematize, and ultimately fissures whiteness at work. Contributors not only provide critical accounts of the histories of whiteness - particularly as they have shaped libraries and archives in higher education - but also interrogate current formations, from the policing of people of color in library spaces to imagined LIS futures. This volume also considers possibilities for challenging oppressive legacies and charting a new course towards anti-racist librarianship, whether in the classroom, at the reference desk, or elsewhere. -- from back cover.

Borne of a professional development workshop, Teaching for Justice highlights the commitment and efforts of LIS faculty and instructors who feature social justice theory and strategies in their courses and classroom practices. This book is geared towards LIS instructors who have begun to incorporate social justice into their course content, as well as those who are interested in learning more about how to address social justice in their classrooms. Chapters provide a pedagogical foundation and motivation for teaching social justice in LIS as a stand alone course or as a theme integrated within topical courses that seemingly "have no relationship" to such issues. The experiences and reflections of chapter contributors will prepare readers with strong arguments for the inclusion of social justice in their LIS classroom, curriculum, and school policies, provide an array of practical techniques intended to secure such inclusion, and a instill a sense of confidence for advocating for the incorporation of social justice as a mainstay of LIS education.

Over the past fifteen years, librarians have increasingly looked to theory as a means to destabilize normative discourses and practices within LIS, to engage in inclusive and non-authoritarian pedagogies, and to organize for social justice. "Critlib," short for "critical librarianship," is variously used to refer to a growing body of scholarship, an intellectual or activist movement within librarianship, an online community that occasionally organizes in-person meetings, and an informal Twitter discussion space active since 2014, identified by the #critlib hashtag. Critlib "aims to engage in discussion about critical perspectives on library practice" but it also seeks to bring "social justice principles into our work in libraries" (http: //critlib.org/about/). The role of theory within librarianship in general, and critical librarianship more specifically, has emerged as a site of tension within the profession. In spite of an avowedly activist and social justice-oriented agenda, critlib--as an online discussion space at least--has come under fire from some for being inaccessible, exclusionary, elitist, and disconnected from the practice of librarianship, empirical scholarship, and on-the-ground organizing for socioeconomic and political change. At the same time, critical librarianship may be becoming institutionalized, as seen in the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, the January 2015 editorial in College and Research Libraries that specifically solicited articles using critical theory or humanistic approaches, and the publication of several critical librarianship monographs by the Association of College and Research Libraries. This book features original research, reflective essays and conversations, and dialogues that consider the relationships between theory, practice, and critical librarianship through the lenses of the histories of librarianship and critical librarianship, intellectual and activist communities, professional practices, information literacy, library technologies, library education, specific theoretical approaches, and underexplored epistemologies and ways of knowing. Karen Nicholson is Manager, Information Literacy, at the University of Guelph, and a PhD candidate (LIS) at Western University, both in Ontario. Her research interests include information literacy and critical university studies. Maura Seale is History Librarian at the University of Michigan and was previously Collections, Research, and Instruction Librarian at Georgetown University. She received an MA in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and an MSI from the University of Michigan. She welcomes comments and can be found on Twitter at @mauraseale.

This book offers a guide for librarians who see their profession as a chance to make a positive difference in their communities -- librarians who recognize that it is no longer enough to stand behind a desk waiting to serve. R. David Lankes, author of The Atlas of New Librarianship, reminds librarians of their mission: to improve society by facilitating knowledge creation in their communities. In this book, he provides tools, arguments, resources, and ideas for fulfilling this mission. Librarians will be prepared to become radical positive change agents in their communities, and other readers will learn to understand libraries in a new way. The librarians of Ferguson, Missouri, famously became positive change agents in August 2014 when they opened library doors when schools were closed because of civil unrest after the shooting of an unarmed teen by police. Working with other local organizations, they provided children and their parents a space for learning, lunch, and peace. But other libraries serve other communities -- students, faculty, scholars, law firms -- in other ways. All libraries are about community, writes Lankes; that is just librarianship. In concise chapters, Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library.

"This essential resource helps educators tackle common and challenging dilemmas that arise in today's classroom-such as diversity, privilege, and intersectionality. This book examines common issues educators face when teaching social justice and diversity-related courses and offers best practices for addressing them. Contributors discuss the many roles instructors play, inside and outside of college and university classrooms, for example, in handling personal threats, responsibly incorporating current events into classroom discussion, navigating their own stigmatized or privileged identities, dealing with bias in teaching evaluations, and engaging in self-care"--

"In this report, the authors introduce the findings of a research study that explores Black and African American students' experiences with libraries, examining the role that race has played in these students' library experiences to identify potential opportunities for libraries to better meet the needs of these users"--

"This report provides an overview of the historical exclusion and disenfranchisement of Blacks and African Americans from libraries and educational institutions in the United States and explores the ways in which the legacy of this exclusion manifests today"--

Reflective dialogue asks us to pause before reacting, to ground ourselves in a sense of compassion for ourselves and others, and to use that grounding to open a space to listen and to speak with the goal of recognizing a shared humanity and appreciating difference. In four sections, Libraries Promoting Reflective Dialogue in a Time of Political Polarization explores the various ways in which librarians experience and respond to political polarization and its effects, both in our everyday work and in our professional communities.

"The role of archives and libraries in our digital age is one of the most pressing concerns of humanists, scholars, and citizens worldwide. This collection brings together specialists from academia, public libraries, governmental agencies, and non-profit archives to pursue common questions about value across the institutional boundaries that typically separate us." --

Autoethnography is a type of research that uses writing and self-examination to explore far-ranging cultural, political, and social issues through personal experience. It is a qualitative, reflexive, ethnographic method where the researcher is also the subject of inquiry.