Symposium
Thursday, June 12th from 12:00pm to 12:01pm
METRO’s Reference and Instruction Interest Group invites you to participate in a June symposium on Critical Pedagogy. This symposium will be held fully online.
The 2025 Critical Pedagogy Symposium (CPS), now in its third iteration since 2021, seeks to provide space for library workers and information professionals of all kinds to collaborate in critical pedagogical thought and critical practice. We want to build community, and to imagine new ways of doing our work by naming and dismantling oppressive systems and imagining new worlds. In this biennial symposium, our overarching aim is to collaborate in growing creative, generous, and mutually supportive intersectional and anti-oppressive work within Library and Information Science (LIS) so that we hone a sharp language for interrogating and dismantling inequities of all kinds and for doing justice work together.
The 2025 symposium will examine global barriers and their impact on library and archival pedagogy. This year’s symposium is inspired by the pedagogies and practices of those thinking about colonialism, imperialism, transnationalism, epistemic injustice, and other frameworks for Decentering the West. With this in mind, we have created three broad tracks through which to consider Decentering the West in our critical pedagogy and practice.
12:00pm – 12:30pm (Choose 1 of 2) Presentation Ancestral Calls: What if Learning is Bearing Witness? And Other Derivatives of June Beer
Conversation with the CPS Team
12:30pm – 1:00pm (Choose 1 of 2) Lightning Talks Understanding Higher-Ed’s Attention Crisis: Pedagogical Approaches for Literacy in Academic Libraries
The Cyber Capitalist Academic Library and its Discontents
Presentation A Global Womanist Framework for Information Literacy Instruction
1:00pm – 1:15pm Break
1:15pm – 2:15pm (Choose 1 of 2) Peer-Review Session For Us by Us: Creating a Global Black Feminist LIS Framework
Presentations The Library as Phantasmagoria: Demystifying Cognitive Labor and the Information Commodity in Scholarly Databases
When the Master’s Tools Are Strange Bedfellows: Navigating — and embracing — business information sources to advance labor and worker power
2:15pm – 2:30pm Break
2:30pm – 4:00pm CLOSING KEYNOTE
Visit the symposium website for updates and to view the Code of Conduct. To learn more about the tracks identified for this symposium, visit the Call for Proposals page. Information about the 2025 co-sponsors and the collaborative team are also available on our website. For questions or more information, contact the team at: criticallibrarysymposium@gmail.com.
Please note: You only need to register once to be registered for every day of the symposium.