The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, Revisions, and New Works, Yvonne Mery and Anthony Sanchez (eds.), ACRL, 2023. 220p. Softcover, $65.00. 9780838939529

Since 2016, the University of Arizona Libraries has hosted the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS), a free, biennial event focused on critical pedagogy in librarianship. Edited by University of Arizona librarians Yvonne Mery and Anthony Sanchez, this volume—The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, Revisions, and New Works—builds on past CLAPS presentations with the goal of increasing participation in future conferences. Originally developed by Paulo Freire, “critical pedagogy recognizes that our education system is shaped by hegemonic political and economic forces, often to the detriment of politically and culturally marginalized students” (Mery and Sanchez, 2023, p. vi). In this case, critical pedagogy and critical information literacy are applied to the library classroom. Simultaneously theoretical and practical, this edited volume emphasizes praxis, and transforms theory into practice to bring about meaningful changes within the classroom. Each chapter provides critical interventions within academia for “those it has historically and systemically excluded” (Hallerduff and Carlton, 2023, p. 76).

Divided into five sections, nine substantive chapters explore a wide range of issues centered on library learning, with the final tenth chapter addressing community-based archives and marginalized populations. The first section, “Critical Pedagogies in the Classroom,” presents three chapters that contain practical advice for teaching in the classroom. In Chapter 1, Gilgan emphasizes the value of facilitation skills—in particular, intergroup dialogue pedagogy and multipartial mediation by not “privilege[ing] one story over another” (4). In Chapter 2, Crowl and Novosel explore ableism, invisible disabilities, neurodivergence, and disability justice and how they affect students and scholarship. Authors are critical of the one-shot model of library instruction but recognize its ubiquity, with most of the advice tailored to this teaching method. They propose that students might be better served if engaged in dialogue and self-advocacy. Gregory and Higgins, however, step outside of the one-shot paradigm in Chapter 3 to discuss a for-credit course they developed that combines critical information literacy with rhetorical analysis of social justice movement practices.

The second section, “Feminist Library Practices,” consists of two chapters that apply feminist analysis to pedagogical and data curation issues. Chapter 4 transitions seamlessly from the previous section by continuing to center on the classroom while incorporating a feminist analysis through the lens of ACRL’s “Authority is Constructed and Contextual” (Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, https://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework#authority). Hallerduff and Carlton encourage teaching librarians to integrate students’ personal experiences as a source of knowledge for research. Chapter 5 offers a more theoretical, philosophical discussion of library practices that continues through the volume’s later chapters. Calvert applies feminist epistemology to data curation practices and promotes a new framework of “situated data” which borrows from feminist standpoint theory, as well as Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges” wherein separation of researcher and subject is not practical.

The third section, “The Labor of Librarianship,” contains two theory-driven chapters exploring librarianship from the employee angle. In Chapter 6, Mirza, Nicholson, and Seale assess how critical library pedagogy has been institutionalized within the neoliberal university and stripped of its radical potential. The authors argue that critical library pedagogy should be reframed as collaborative care work that does not ignore negative social constructs or prejudices that occur outside the safety of the classroom. In Chapter 7, Douglas, Deal, and Hernandez critique the cooptation of self-care by capitalism and criticize standardization as a strategy for building sustainability within library instruction programs. Instead, they advocate for community care and a critical examination of the ways that information literacy education is structured, even within a critical library pedagogical framework.

The fourth section, “Practices of Care,” continues the previous section’s focus on care work and community care. In Chapter 8, Evans and Meeks apply a disability justice lens to care work in academic librarianship. Chiu, Douglas, Gadsby, Kumbier, and Nataraj in Chapter 9 present a multivocal story that applies lessons from connection-focused relational-cultural theory to librarianship. Collectively, sections three and four emphasize the relational nature of care work and seek to revalue such practices in libraries where colleagues “regularly check on each other’s well-being” (132).

The fifth section, “Community Archives,” contains a single entry by Chapter 10’s authors, Lee, Suagee-Beauduy (Cherokee Nation), and Montes, who share their preliminary research on community-based archives’ (CBA) use of naming practices, highlighting the multiplicities present in CBAs. They invite those who use archives to engage in the decolonial reading practice of “fingerweaving,” the building of relationships and sources in communities originally excluded from archives and collections (190).

Skillfully organized, this text covers a wide breadth of topics that seamlessly blend into and build upon each other. This “toolkit for critical library pedagogy” (Mery & Sanchez, 2023, p. vi) would be a welcome addition to any academic library invested in critical information literacy and pedagogy. While the book’s intended audience may already be familiar with critical pedagogy, the content and its writing are such that academic librarians who are new to this topic could still benefit. Additional information about the Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium (CLAPS) can be found at the CLAPS website (https://clps.arizona.edu/), with videos of select keynotes and presentations available on the CLAPS YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/@clapsconference/). The next CLAPS event is expected to take place in fall 2024. — Dr. Julie Setele, SUNY Buffalo State University

References

Hallerduff, M., and Carlton, H. (2023). What is authority?: A feminist investigation of personal experience as knowledge in student research and writing. In Y. Mery & A. Sanchez (Eds.), The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, revisions, and new works (pp. 63–85). Association of College and Research Libraries.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066.

Mery, Y., and Sanchez, A. (2023). Walking the long road: Transforming library spaces for liberation. In Y. Mery & A. Sanchez (Eds.), The Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium: Reflections, revisions, and new works (pp. v–x). Association of College and Research Libraries.