An Abbreviated Syllabus
Building a Critical Culture: Information Ethics, Diverse Communities, and Critical Librarianship
Building a Critical Culture is a course I designed and began teaching in Summer 2022 for San José State University School of Information. I look forward to my third summer this year (2024). It’s based an article I wrote of the same title, “Building a Critical Culture: How Critical Librarianship Falls Short in the Workplace.”
This is an abbreviated syllabus, as I review materials each summer, removing and adding. This also does not contain the lecture videos I include with them, which contextualizes their intended purpose, nor does it include assignments.
Are you using this syllabus for any reason in particular? Hit me up — I’d love to hear about it.
Creative Commons Information
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Course Description
Course Learning Outcomes
Professional values and conduct in LIS professions—codified or cultural—can uphold the status quo, leaving patrons and workers out. In this course, students will engage with critical theory and practice as means to critique, interpret, and understand how professional values can impact marginalized and diverse communities. Critical theory, a social theory that aims to critique and change society as a whole, has been part of MLIS studies for over 10 years, and its desired outcome to ensure information ethics, workplace equity, and more, remains even more relevant today.
Evaluate the historical and contemporary context of race and identity to propose new standards for professional values, conduct, and ethics.
Analyze how professional values, conduct, and ethics might impact marginalized communities.
Apply critical theory to inform LIS practice.
Details
This course is designed to be taught asynchronously.
This course typically has ~25 students enrolled.
There are four major assignments due during the 8 weeks of this course: weekly discussion of the readings; three prompted reflections; an issue brief (final assignment); and peer review of an in-progress issue brief.
Materials listed here are part of the required reading list and Further Reading list. Not all materials are listed here as they change every year.
All materials are open access or accessible through San José State University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Library. If you do not have access to materials listed here, try your public library. If they do not have these materials in their library databases, try requesting materials through your public library’s Interlibrary Loan Service (referred to as ILL).
Week 1
Introduction: Building a Critical Culture
adrienne maree brown, 2017. Tools for Emergent Strategy Facilitation, pp. 214-245. In Emergent strategy : shaping change, changing worlds. AK Press. Access via King Library.
Fobazi Ettarh, January 10, 2018. Vocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves. In the Library With The Lead Pipe.
Jennifer A. Ferretti, 2020. Building a Critical Culture: How Critical Librarianship Falls Short in the Workplace. Communications in Information Literacy, 14(1), 134-152.
Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, November 20, 2017. ShoutOut: Pauline Wilson (Ret.). The Ink on the Page [blog post].
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, 2012. Research through Imperial Eyes. In Decolonizing methodologies : research and indigenous peoples (Second edition). Zed Books. Access via King Library.
Pauline Wilson, 1979. Librarians as Teachers: The Study of an Organization Fiction. The Library Quarterly (Chicago), 49(2), 146–162. Access via King Library.
Week 2
Professional Values and Information Ethics
Note: As you read through these codes, ethics, and values, think about whether or not they are easy to understand, if you can apply them to your work (or have already) in the day-to-day, and whether or not they reflect your personal values.
American Library Association, 1939, 2021. Professional Ethics.
American Library Association, 1939, 2019. Library Bill of Rights.
Society of American Archivists, 2005, 2020. SAA Core Values Statement and Code of Ethics.
We Here®️ LLC, 2021. Code of Conduct for We Here Events.
Digital Library Federation, 2016, 2020, 2022. DLF Code of Conduct.
Don Fallis, 2007. Information ethics for twenty-first century library professionals. Library Hi Tech, 25(1), 23–36. Access via King Library.
Stuart Ferguson, Clare Thornley, & Forbes Gibb, 2016. Beyond codes of ethics: how library and information professionals navigate ethical dilemmas in a complex and dynamic information environment. International Journal of Information Management, 36(4), 543–556. Access via King Library.
Jacqueline Frank, Meghan Salsbury, Hannah McKelvey, & Rachelle McLain, 2021. Digital Equity & Inclusion Strategies for Libraries: Promoting Student Success for All Learners. The International Journal of Information, Diversity, & Inclusion, 5(3), 185–205. Access via King Library.
American Library Association. Are Libraries Neutral? (Note: I can no longer find the recording of this event in its entirety. Read full remarks where available.)
Anastasia Chiu, Fobazi M. Ettarh, Jennifer A. Ferretti, 2021. Not the Shark, but the Water: How Neutrality and Vocational Awe Intertwine to Uphold White Supremacy. In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory. MIT Press.
Elvia Arroyo-Ramírez, Jasmine Jones, Shannon O’Neill, Holly A. Smith, March 12, 2022. An Introduction to Radical Empathy in Archival Practice.
Ray Laura Henry, May 2016. Library Technologies and the Ethics of Care. The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 42(3), pp. 284-285. Access via King Library.
Jennifer A. Ferretti, 2018. Neutrality is Hostility: The Impact of (False) Neutrality in Academic Librarianship. [Blog post]. Medium.
Nisha Mody, January 12, 2022. Showing Up: Caring for Each Other During Messy Times. Digital Library Federation 2021 Forum. Council on Library and Information Resources. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9fgsRGxwsg.
Week 3
Debates, Responses, Case Studies
Week 4
Race, Identity, and Libraries
What's covered here is an introduction to a huge topic with a lot history. Please keep in mind this module/topic could go on for many weeks and even years. It also, in no way, encompasses ALL identities (race, ethnicity, class, citizenship, etc.). Race is nuanced, and like gender, is a construct. But these social constructs come with very real (as in proven, documented, researched, etc.) marginalization, oppression, stereotyping and biases.
Todd Honma, 2005. Trippin’ Over the Color Line: The Invisibility of Race in Library and Information Studies. InterActions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies,1(2).
Brenton Stewart & Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, 2019. “Hard to find”: information barriers among LGBT college students. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 71(5), 601–617. Access via King Library.
Maura Seale and Rafia Mirza, 2019. Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom. Journal of Radical Librarianship, Vol. 5 (2019), pp. 41-60.
Jennifer A. Ferretti, Cristina Fontánez Rodríguez, Yvette Ramírez, Amanda Toledo, & Gabby Womack, 2022. Dialogue: Presenters Respond to Questions [section] in “Latinidad” as Erasure: Words from a Critical Discussion on the Single Narrative of Latinidad. up//root: a we here publication.
Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, & Ione T. Damasco, 2019. Low Morale in Ethnic and Racial Minority Academic Librarians: An Experiential Study. Library Trends, 68(2), 174–212. Access via King Library.
Audre Lorde, 1984. Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. In Sister outsider : essays and speeches. Crossing Press. Access via King Library.
John Siegel, Martin Morris, & Gregg A. Stevens, 2020. Perceptions of Academic Librarians toward LGBTQ Information Needs: An Exploratory Study. College & Research Libraries, 81(1), 122.
Week 5
Critical Theories and Critical Librarianship
David James Hudson, February 25, 2016. On Critical Librarianship & Pedagogies of the Practical. Keynote address at Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium.
Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight, 2021. Introduction: This Is Only the Beginning. In Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory.
Baharak Yousefi, 2017. On the Disparity Between What We Say and What We Do in Libraries. In The Feminists among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership, pp. 91-105. Litwin Books. Access via King Library.
Silvia Vong, 2022. More Critical, Less Managerial: Addressing the Managerialist Ideology in Academic Libraries. Partnership: The Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, 16(2), 1–20.
Nicole A. Cooke, 2020). Critical library instruction as a pedagogical tool. Communications in Information Literacy, 14(1), 86–96.
Week 6
Dis/ability and Libraries
Sami Schalk. Disability. In Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies. NYU Press.
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018. Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access,. In Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice, pp. 21-42. Arsenal Pulp Press. Access via King Library.
Amelia N. Gibson and John D. Martin, 2019. Re-situating information poverty: Information marginalization and parents of individuals with disabilities. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 70(5), 476–487. Access via King Library.
Gracen Brilmyer and Crystal Lee, 2023. Terms of use: Crip legibility in information systems. First Monday, 28(1).
Subini Ancy Annamma, David Connor, & Beth Ferri, 2013. Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability (pp. 1-11). Race, Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1–31. Access via King Library.
Week 7
How We Gather in Community, How We Change
Note: What's covered here includes insights from facilitators we've read before like adrienne maree brown and Priya Parker on how we gather and change. After all, visioning as we're doing in this course, inevitably leads to change. How will it come to pass if we don't understand change?
adrienne maree brown, 2017. Intentional Adaptation: How We Change. In Emergent strategy : shaping change, changing worlds, pp. 67-82. AK Press. Access via King Library.
adrienne maree brown, May 10, 2018. we will not cancel us. [Blog post]. adrienne maree brown.
Priya Parker, 2018. Create a Temporary Alternative World. In The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters, pp. 111-144. Access via PDF.
Week 8
Final Project Working Session (no readings)
THANKS FOR READING ~
THANKS FOR READING ~
A FEW MORE POINTS BEFORE YOU GO
When purchasing books, please consider purchasing from your local bookstore or from Bookshop.org, where We Reads has a Shop. Purchases made through our Shop go to scholarships for Community Study.
Say thanks/give appropriate credit to the authors/creators of the works included here. Many are BIPOC and are on social media or can be found via their professional email addresses.
I actually don’t believe in citation styles and think they should be abolished for one comprehensive formula.