Online/Virtual Event
Friday, December 13th from 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Join METRO’s Reference and Instruction Interest Group for a conversation about decolonial perspectives - practices and frameworks - in librarianship. For the upcoming 2025 Critical Pedagogy Symposium on Decentering the West, the Case Studies in Critical Pedagogy will feature case studies and a primer for learning about and thinking about anti-colonial theory and pedagogy together.
Schedule:
Introductory Remarks
Primer
Miriam Neptune, Director of Milstein Center Exhibitions, Programming and Public Engagement, Barnard College Library
The primer on Case Studies in Libraries from decolonial perspectives will be offered by Miriam Neptune, who brings her creative work as a filmmaker to her library practice of engagement. Neptune collaborates with artists to incorporate media, digital projects, and community engagement projects that cultivate decolonial perspectives in library space. Neptune has supported the installations of various in-space, and digital practices, from her co-curation of the exhibition Undesign the Redline @ Barnard, to most recently I Am Queen Mary, a transnational public art project and collaborative sculpture that memorializes Denmark’s colonial impact in the Caribbean and those who fought against it, and most recently Trigger Planting, 2.0, which explores the landscape of abortion access and reproductive injustice in the United States. Neptune will introduce a process of community connection through various interrogations of the library's roles in practice, geographies, and space.
About our presenter: Miriam Neptune is the inaugural Director of Milstein Center Exhibitions, Programming and Public Engagement. She has worked at Barnard College Library in various capacities since 2011, and at Smith College as Digital Scholarship Librarian from 2015-2018. She was previously Barnard Library’s Director of Teaching, Learning, and Digital Scholarship, and Interim Co-Dean, and as the Senior Associate Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. From 2021-2023, Miriam co-curated the exhibition Undesign the Redline @ Barnard. She also co-produced the bilingual digital humanities project Nos Cambió La Vida: Our Lives Transformed, and was organizer of the annual Scholar and Feminist Conference and an editor of The Scholar and Feminist Online. Miriam is also a filmmaker whose creative work focuses on resistance to anti-blackness, forced displacement, and gendered violence in the Americas, partnering on activist media projects with Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees.
Case Study 1: Israeli Damage to Archives, Libraries, and Museums in Gaza, October 2023–January 2024: Reflections on Reporting
Gretchen Alexander, Brooklyn Public Library, and Librarians & Archivists with Palestine
Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) is an all-volunteer organization that was founded in 2013, following a two week delegation of information workers to Palestine. In December 2023, two months into the ongoing genocide in Gaza, LAP began the process of attempting to document the destruction of libraries and archives in Gaza. Through our research, we identified two archives, twelve libraries, and eight museums that had been damaged or destroyed between October 2023 and January 2024. Despite cataloging losses across different types of institutions, there are many archives and book collections that remain unrepresented in our report, including personal libraries and school libraries. In the eight months since this report was first published, the scale of cultural destruction has reached a level beyond comprehension. In this presentation, a member of LAP will unpack the process of researching and writing the report. We will highlight how the destruction of archives and libraries represents a fundamental act of colonial violence, an act that has deep historical context in Palestine. By raising awareness and transparency about these significant losses, we engage with our potential as information workers to strengthen our de-colonial frameworks and capitalize on our visibility.
About our presenter: Gretchen Alexander is a librarian at Brooklyn Public Library and a member of Librarians & Archivists with Palestine.
Case Study 2: SHIFT from SIFT: Infusing Design Justice to Source Evaluation
Shannon Simpson, Scholarly Instruction Librarian, Kenyon College
Helping students learn how to effectively evaluate information for use in personal and scholarly endeavors is not always an easy nut to crack. Having adapted the CRAAP test to consider more perspectives beyond scholarly voices and to consider the capitalist nature of information and structures of white supremacy that in large part are still in place, CRAAP can take a long time to get through with so many added adjustments. However, switching to the SIFT method didn’t seem comprehensive enough, either. Enter: Design Justice. Design Justice is a set of principles that asks us to consider Indigenous Principles, and those most impacted by design at the heart of the process. While useful for many other aspects of instruction, I recently started utilizing the Design Justice rubric of “Harm and Help” into the SIFT (now my S.H.I.F.T) acronym and found it filled a much needed gap I was looking for. Asking students to consider who information was designed to Help or Harm and who has access, now and when the information may have first been created, helps illuminate information gatekeepers from the past and present, and illuminate and articulate these barriers in their projects while contemplating a world where information could be more freely available for everyone. In this short talk, I will walk attendees through how to interactively engage students with a more decolonized and anti-racist approach to information evaluation using the Design Justice infused approach of the SHIFT method.
About our presenter: Shannon Simpson, Scholarly Instruction Librarian, Kenyon College, has authored, co-authored, and edited numerous articles, presentations, research studies, and web material for various libraries, conferences, consulting firms, and print journals. Her writing, instruction, and research is currently focused on information literacy, design justice, critical pedagogies, diversity, and equity. In a previous life, Shannon played in a national symphony in South America and attained a Series 7 brokerage license. Shannon has an MLIS and has completed certificates from Johns Hopkins Carey Business School and the Harvard Leadership Institute.
Case Study 3: Praxisioners Platicando: Fostering Belonging Through Culturally Centered Learning
Daisy Muralles, Equity & Open Resources Librarian & Vanessa Varko-Fontana, Latinx Student Success Coordinator, California State University, East Bay
We took a popular educational model often utilized in libraries, the book club, and added a cultural and community building lens as part of that experience. In this case study we will share our pilot project of how a book club acted as a vehicle to hold platicas that allowed Hispanic/Latinx students space to come together with their own cultural experiences as teachers and learners. We explored things that we didn't know that much about within our culture–the unnamed things that somehow we understood as part of our cultural identities and selves but not always sure of where or why they are part of our culture. We are a Latinx coordinator and a Latinx librarian navigating higher education and currently working at a Hispanic serving institution that recently received the Seal of Excellencia. As praxisioners, we recognize that creating these spaces benefits our students as well as ourselves. We need to keep supporting ourselves, as Latinx educators and cultural workers in higher education, to be able to show up for our racially and ethnically diverse students. We need to keep creating spaces that support and retain us, allowing us the agency to pursue cultural programming and learning opportunities we recognize as impactful to our students AND ourselves.
About our presenters: Daisy Muralles, Equity & Open Resources Librarian & Vanessa Varko-Fontana, Latinx Student Success Coordinator, California State University, East Bay
Conversation