Featured Speaker: Digital and Physical Safety & Knowledge Work Bravery - Lessons from 33 Years in the Library DEI Space
Location
KIPJ Theatre
Session Type
Event
Start Date
30-4-2024 11:15 AM
End Date
30-4-2024 11:55 AM
Abstract
What makes us safe in the digital space? Today, academics and academia are on a perilous front line sometimes enabled by digital technologies that simultaneously connect us and create epistemic and emotional safety while leaving us open to a host of unexpected threats. Doxxers target individual faculty, including librarians, and nefarious organizations attack and undermine higher education itself. The dangers of this moment must be seen in a larger context of knowledge that has long been risky for oppressed people and those in solidarity movements. We need not be paralyzed by fear. We can take care of each other and our knowledge workers. We can learn from histories of fugitivity, abolition, and community care in the creation and curation of safe and brave spaces in our libraries for all our academic communities – even those communities that are yet to be built. We can learn from educators who challenged the idea of “at risk youth,” and those who bravely exposed the pervasiveness of white supremacy in our world. Librarians can get ahead of the dangers by applying asset-based strategies that access joy without denying the truth of oppressions.
Featured Speaker: Digital and Physical Safety & Knowledge Work Bravery - Lessons from 33 Years in the Library DEI Space
KIPJ Theatre
What makes us safe in the digital space? Today, academics and academia are on a perilous front line sometimes enabled by digital technologies that simultaneously connect us and create epistemic and emotional safety while leaving us open to a host of unexpected threats. Doxxers target individual faculty, including librarians, and nefarious organizations attack and undermine higher education itself. The dangers of this moment must be seen in a larger context of knowledge that has long been risky for oppressed people and those in solidarity movements. We need not be paralyzed by fear. We can take care of each other and our knowledge workers. We can learn from histories of fugitivity, abolition, and community care in the creation and curation of safe and brave spaces in our libraries for all our academic communities – even those communities that are yet to be built. We can learn from educators who challenged the idea of “at risk youth,” and those who bravely exposed the pervasiveness of white supremacy in our world. Librarians can get ahead of the dangers by applying asset-based strategies that access joy without denying the truth of oppressions.
Comments
Dr. Isabel Espinal has been a librarian since 1991 and is currently an Academic Engagement librarian for African Studies, Afro American Studies, Latin American, Caribbean & Latinx Studies, Native American & Indigenous Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass). She has given presentations on racial equity in librarianship, library and information services to Latinx populations, information literacy, the climate crisis and libraries, Dominican women writers in the United States, Latinx literature, and Taíno survivance in the Caribbean diaspora, among other topics. Her publications include “A New Vocabulary for Inclusive Librarianship: Applying Whiteness Theory to Our Profession” (2001), “Wanted: Latino Librarians,” (2003), “What Do Latino Students Know Anyway about Information Literacy?” (2004), “A Holistic Approach For Inclusive Librarianship: Decentering Whiteness In Our Profession,” (2018), and “Dewhitening Librarianship: A Policy Proposal for Libraries,” (2021). Her most recent publications are “Counterspace Support for BIPOC Employees Within a Holistic JEDI Library Framework,” (2023), and “Microaffections and Microaffirmations: Refusing to Reproduce Whiteness via Microaffirmative Actions,” (2022). Dr. Espinal is a former president of REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking.