Interest Group Meeting
Friday, March 4th from 1:00pm to 2:30pm
Critical Race Theory (CRT) stems from legal studies and aims to expose, critically analyze and, ultimately, eliminate systemic racism. In librarianship, applied CRT investigates our practices with a goal of dismantling white supremacy and the many ways it manifests in libraries, from our architectures, our collection development, to our teaching and learning practices.
We’d like to think together about how critical race theory informs our pedagogy and our practice.
We invite you to consider how we can integrate criticalities of race to our approaches to teaching and/or reference practice. How are we reifying power structures of racial inequity in library services, school, and staffing models? How do we continue to support ourselves, faculty, students, patrons, and the public? What do we need to keep doing? Start? Stop?
This METRO Reference & Instruction SIG event will be held March 4th, 2022. Let's build a collective discourse that will support practitioners from various institutional contexts and who come to this venture with varying levels of expertise!
2022 Case Studies Presenters
Dewhitening Librarianship: A Policy Proposal for Libraries
- April Hathcock - Director of Scholarly Communication & Information Policy, NYU
- Dr. Isabel Espinal - Librarian for African Studies, Afro American Studies, Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies, Native American & Indigenous Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies, UMass-Amherst
- Maria Rios - Humanities Research Services Librarian, UMass-Amherst
A Materialist Approach to Understanding Information and Society
- Betsy Yoon - Assistant Professor & Public and International Affairs Library Liaison, CUNY, Baruch College
Beautiful Imposition: An Instructor's Toolkit to Cultivate Critical, Creative and Independent Thinking
- kynita stringer-stanback - Information Activist/Research Designer/Storyteller
Primer in Critical Race Theories in Libraries
- Dr. Shaundra Walker - Library Director at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia
Shaundra Walker serves as Library Director at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. She is also a tenured Associate Professor of Library Science. A native of Macon, Georgia, she earned a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Mercer University. Shaundra also holds a Master of Science in Library and Information Studies from Clark Atlanta University and a Bachelor of Arts in history from Spelman College.
A member of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Georgia Library Association (GLA), and GLA-Black Caucus, she was the recipient of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association/DEMCO Outstanding Librarian of the Year Award in 2020.
Her research interests include the recruitment and retention of librarians of color, organizational development within Minority Serving Institution (MSI) libraries, and critical librarianship. Shaundra regularly speaks on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in library science. Her most recent book chapter, “Ann Allen Shockley: An Activist Librarian for Black Special Collections,” appears in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight (MIT Press, 2021). She is co-editor of The Black Librarian in America: Reflections, Resistance, and Reawakening (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).
The Reference and Instruction Special Interest Group co-leaders are: Kate Adler, Director of Library Services, MCNY, Linda Miles, Head of Reference and OER Librarian, Hostos Community College, & Shawnta Smith-Cruz, Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement, NYU.