Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Profesional Praxis

by Lua Gregory (Editor), Shana Higgins (Editor)

Information Literacy and Social Justice: Radical Professional Praxis extends the discussion of information literacy and its social justice aspects begun by James Elmborg, Heidi L.M. Jacobs, Cushla Kapitzke, Maria T. Accardi, Emily Drabinski, and Alana Kumbier, and Maura Seale. Chapters address the democratizing values implicit in librarianship's professional ethics, such as intellectual freedom, social responsibility, and democracy, in relation to the sociopolitical context of information literacy. Contributors, ranging from practicing librarians to scholars of related disciplines, demonstrate how they construct intentional connections between theoretical perspectives and professional advocacy to curriculum and pedagogy. The book contributes to professional discourse on libraries in their social context, through a re-activation of the library neutrality debate, as well as through an investigation of what it means for a global citizen to be information literate in late capitalism.

The violence of information literacy : neoliberalism and the human as capital / Nathaniel F. Enright --
The neoliberal library / Maura Seale --
You've got to know and know properly : citizenship in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never let me go and the aims of information literacy instruction / Jeff Lilburn --
From "A crusade against ignorance" to a "Crisis of authenticity" : curating information for a participatory democracy / Andrew Battista --
Critical information literacy in the college classroom : exploring scholarly knowledge production through the digital humanities / Andrea Baer --
The tyranny of tradition : how information paradigms limit librarians' teaching and student scholarship / Carrie Donovan and Sara O'Donnell --
The three-credit solution : social justice in an information literacy course / Anne Leonard and Maura A. Smale --
Hip-hop and information literacy : critically incorporating hip-hop in information literacy instruction / Dave Ellenwood --
Forces of oppression in the information landscape : free speech and censorship in the United States / Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins --
Critical legal information literacy : legal information as a social construct / Yasmin Sokkar Harker --
Information power to the people : students and librarians dialoguing about power, social justice, and information / Amanda J. Swygart-Hobaugh --
Information literacy and service-learning : creating powerful synergies / Christopher A. Sweet --
The public academic library : friction in the teflon funnel / Patti Ryan and Lisa Sloniowski

Genres: Nonfiction, Library Science, Librarianship, Academic, Research, Professional Development, Social Justice

306 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

Reviews

[Amy Layton · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read!  I absolutely love some of the authors in here, such as Maria T. Accardi and Maura Seale, so I knew that this was going to be something good.  This anthology discusses intellectual freedom, information literacy, social justice, and how they all connect with each other in the midst of late-stage capitalism.  One of my favorite essays include "'You've Got to Know and Know Properly': Citizenship in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and the Aims of Information Literacy Instruction" and one that I found rather thought-provoking was "Hip-Hop and Information Literacy: Critically Incorporating Hip-Hop in Information Literacy Instruction".  

And what these essays lacked in academic research, they made up for in anecdotal evidence as well as a reinforcement to what they tout as critical information theory.  Overall, this anthology provided a really wonderful overview of various aspects of librarianship and the work involved in such in addition to the communities that we serve.  Definitely worth reading!

Review cross-listed here!

[Nonfiction-- KCM · Rating 4 out of 5]

Information Literacy and Social Justice edited by Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins c. 2013 (294 pages—Library Juice Press)

Key Quotations

“The Violence of Information Literacy: Neoliberalism and the Human as Capital” Nathaniel Enright
• “As Leitner, Sheppard, Sziato, and Maringanti (2007) argue, ‘Under neoliberalism, individual freedom is redefined as the capacity for self-realization and freedom from bureaucracy rather than freedom from want, with human behaviour reconceptualized along economic lines’” (21).
• “During its early gestation, ‘neoliberalism remained a marginal economic movement’ and could barely challenge the dominance of the Keynesian commitment to ‘regulatory policies designed to stabilize capitalism and protect its citizens from its worst excesses’ (Dean 2009)” (23).

“The Neoliberal Library” Maura Seale
• “In Foucault’s theorization, power ‘is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation to from one point to another . . .’ Discursive formations are the systems through which power operates and through which it is contested or supported . . . Power works not only by prohibiting certain forms of discourse but also through the production of discourses. In essence, power operates through knowledge production. / Edward Said [founder of postcolonial studies] uses Foucault’s articulation of the nexus of discourse, knowledge, and power to trace the formation of Oriental Studies as a discipline. Orientalism, Said argues, is a discursive formation, the essence of which is the ‘ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority . . .’ Orientalism is not invested in ‘empirical data’ about the Orient, but rather ‘representing institutionalized Western knowledge of the Orient’” (41).
• “Pawley (2003) argues that the term ‘information literacy’ embeds two contradictory ideals—‘a promethean vision of citizen empowerment and democracy, and, on the other, a desire to control the ‘quality’ of information—and that ultimately, this tension can be productive and should be explored” (42).
• “Librarianship’s interest and investment in the classifying and ordering knowledge, in ascribing order to the world, too, are an enactment of power that often reproduces contemporary social, economic, and political inequities . . . Although information literacy appears in scholarship prior to 1989, it was only formally codified by the American Library Association [in 1989]” (46).
• “Saunders (2010) interrogates higher education and argues that neoliberal ideology ‘strengthens and extends some of the nefarious purposes of our colleges and universities’ through ‘the infiltration of economic rationality with higher education, which has resulted in the prioritization of revenue generation and efficiency, corporate governance replacing shared and collegial models of decision making, faculty acting like entrepreneurs, and students being treated and identifying themselves as consumers” (49).
• “The appeal to ‘authoritative’ sources of information in the ACRL Standards and the CRAAP test—usually defined as that produced by for-profit publishers and thus only available through library subscriptions and purchases—reenforces the notion that students are consumers and that information and learning are their commodities” (52).
• “Harvey also argues that neoliberal states are generally hostile toward and have consistently acted to limit democratic governance, despite their constant invocation of ideas like freedom that would seem to be bound up with the idea of democracy, particularly in an American context” (57).
• “Information literacy, if theorized differently, could work to challenge neoliberal discourse rather than eagerly adopting it; it could truly become a form of critical pedagogy and subject neoliberalism to critical analysis and thereby work to derive alternatives” (58).

“’You’ve Got to Know and Know Properly’: Citizenship in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and the Aims of Information Literacy Instruction” Jeff Lilburn
• Citizenship, like democracy, is a contested term. Definitions of citizenship generally include references to membership in a community or nation state entailing protections and rights as well as duties and responsibilities. Citizenship can be active and critical, or it can simply mean allegiance to an existing way of life” (63).
• “Recent work on information literacy has directed greater attention to the influence that political power and dominant ideologies have on education. Teaching, including the teaching of information literacy, occurs, as Heidi Jacobs (2008) explains, within a sociopolitical context. Jacobs points to information literacy’s connection to social justice ideas and initiatives and argues that information literacy is ‘not only educational, but inherently political, cultural and social. James Elmborg also describes education as a political activity and cites the work of Paulo Freire, Henry Giroux and others to explain how schools often enact the dominant ideology of their society” (72).
• “Neutrality is not a sign of impartiality but rather a failure or refusal to recognize that teaching does, in fact, take place within a specific sociopoltical context” (74).

“From ‘A Crusade against Ignorance’ to a ‘Crisis of Authenticity’: Curating Information for a Participatory Democracy” Andrew Battista
• “According to IFLA (2005), the ability to find, evaluate, and appropriate information to further one’s agenda is ‘a basic human right’ . . .” (81).
• Information literacy as construed today emerges from the Greco-Roman concept of the capable citizen who pursues an education to prepare for public life in a democracy. In this vein, Shapiro and Hughes (1996) argue that information literacy should be understood as ‘a new liberal art [. . . ] as essential to the mental framework of the educated information-age citizen as the trivium of basic liberal arts (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) was to the educated person in medieval society” (82-83).
• “Andrew Delbanco (2012) . . . writes that a college education should help students ‘develop certain qualities of mind and heart requisite for reflective citizenship,’ which include:
1. A skeptical discontent with the present, informed by a sense of the past.
2. The ability to make connections among seemingly disparate phenomena.
3. Appreciation of the natural world, enhanced by knowledge of science and the arts.
4. A willingness to imagine experience from perspectives other than one’s own
5. A sense of ethical responsibility” (83).
• “Existing measures of knowledge, especially multiple-choice tests, often do not correspond with the complexity information seekers experience in today’s digital landscapes, but instead reinforce rote learning and decision making in a context where there is an ostensible ‘correct choice.’ Creating tests with illusion of definite knowledge does not coalesce with how most people teaching in humanistic disciplines understand epistemology, nor does multiple choice assessments set up students to be engaged citizens in a world where information is exchanged on social medial platforms dynamically” (86-87).

“Critical Information Literacy in the College Classroom: Exploring Scholarly Knowledge Production through the Digital Humanities” Andrea Baer
• “Academic scholarship, like all information, is born out of social and political structures that are not immune to bias and power relations” (99).
• “Many college and library classes often imply that academic sources require little scrutiny, based on the presumption that academic work is always well-researched and well-argued . . . [E]ffective information literacy instruction goes beyond simple distinctions between popular and scholarly sources, as educators encourage deeper understandings of scholarly work, practices, and communities” (101).
• “Imagine, for example, a classroom of students who have been told repeatedly that academic writing is proper and that informal ways of speaking are incorrect, without being encouraged to consider how notions of propriety and correctness are culturally and politically situated. What if those students were exposed to critiques of academia as elitist, or to arguments that academic discourse is not the single ‘correct’ way of speaking but simply one linguistic style that has emerged from a particular context?” (103).

“The Tyranny of Tradition: How Information Paradigms Limit Librarians’ Teaching and Student Scholarship” Carrie Donovan and Sara O’Donnell
• “Higher education is tasked with preparing students for responsible citizenship, not merely conveying decontextualized systems of knowledge or isolated skill sets (Freire, 1985)” (123).
• “As the term implies, any process that involves cognitive conflict is bound to be an uncomfortable one . . . As educators we want to ease frustrations, instill skills, and provide answers. But it is precisely the space of questioning that leads to more effective information evaluation” (125).
• “In order to properly empower students to take responsibility for their education and enter the world as fully prepared and responsible citizens, it is necessary to create a sense of authorial identity that extends beyond the classroom. Authorship is a state that has repercussions for more that just the writing process. It is a state that works to inculcate a sense of authority in students in which they see themselves as primary players in scholarly dialogue” (126).
• “Before we can expect students to engage in new ways of communication and enter into academic citizenry we must first legitimate their existing modes of communication [music, texting, social media] as reasonable entryways into the world of information” (127).
• “The peer-reviewed limiter that appears in many academic databases represents the epitome of dichotomous thinking, as it does not take into account the various review processes that may fall outside this strictly defined category and it eliminates the student researcher’s own thinking and decision-making as a potential participant in the review process” (133).

“The Three-Credit Solution: Social Justice in an Information Literacy Course” by Anne Leonard and Maura Smale
• “Critical pedagogy encourages us to recognize students’ prior knowledge, and reminds us that our students bring real and relevant life experiences into the classroom” (145).
• “Students can interrogate information sources to determine how and why they were made, how they are intended to be used, whether there are benefits to their use, and whether anyone is excluded as authors or audience, among other questions” (145).
• “Badke asserts that information literacy is a ‘credible academic subject’ that invites engagement with the ‘sociological and ethical implications’ of information and its production, dissemination, and consumption” (146).
• “The idea that media ownership could influence the promotion or suppression of a news story resonates with students and encourages reflection upon the censorship they have encountered” (155).

“Forces of Oppression in the Information Landscape: Free Speech and Censorship in the US” Lua Gregory and Shana Higgins
• “Most of our students now enter higher education with a common language of use value and return on investment in relation to schooling, a valorization of individual freedom, and a ‘banking’ conception of education resulting from NCLB” (186).
• “Henry Giroux (2004) . . . reminds us that ‘Education is only about issues of work and economics but also about questions of justice, social freedom, and the capacity for democratic agency, action, and change as well as the related issues of power, exclusion, and citizenship. Education at its best is about enabling student to take seriously questions about how they ought to live their lives, uphold the ideals of a just society, and act upon the promises of a strong democracy’” (186-187).
• “There are many lenses through which we could examine power and oppression: via political thought, from a sociological perspective, as a feminist, as a matter of ethics, etc. Oppression is not a discrete experience but rather ‘occurs at the group or macro level, and goes well beyond individuals. Sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism are forms of oppression’ (Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2012).” (188).
• “Affluence is linked to the means of production of data, information, and knowledge. Thus in a capitalist economic system, free market capitalism, in which some have more capital (means) to be used in the production and dissemination of goods, affluence begets affluence even in relation to information and knowledge. Therefore if we do not provide students with ‘a critical lens and critical language for looking at capitalism, they make assumptions about it, such as assuming that capitalism and democracy are the same thing, which they are not. It is a big part of the overall structure of oppression’ (Sleeter, 2011).” (189).
• “Neoliberal policy has been so effectively linked to ideas of individual freedom, and through this conception of freedom to democracy that many of us have failed to notice that ‘[t]hirty years of neoliberal freedoms have . . . produced immense concentrations of corporate power in energy, the media, pharmaceuticals, transportation, and even retailing’ (Harvey, 2005). In effect, our choices and freedoms when it comes to information are often linked back to the market, which constrains that which is available through consolidation and the privilege of affluence” (189-190).
• “False consciousness as defined by Jost (1995) is ‘the holding of false or inaccurate beliefs that are contrary to one’s own social interest and which thereby contribute to the maintenance of the disadvantaged positions of the self or the group’ (1995). Jost recognizes that false consciousness can take many forms, including a failure to perceive injustice and disadvantage, justification of social roles, false attribution to blame, identification with the oppressor, resistance to change, and fatalism. All these manifestations of false consciousness are disturbing, but fatalism is particularly unsettling when we think of the ramifications of its hold on an individual. When one is fatalistic, one believes that the current political system is impossible to change and that ‘protest is futile’ (Jost, 1995)” (190).
• “Barriers to effective use of information may be cultural, socioeconomic, policy related, and due to the increasing corporatization of information, may be distorted or simply not accessible” (192).
• “Shor (1993) describes Freirean critical consciousness as having four qualities: awareness of how power is organized and exercised in society, critical literacy, recognizing and challenging normalized behaviors and values, and taking action to initiate change toward more just relations” (194).
• “Currently, a small percentage of corporations own the means of news media production, otherwise known as media oligopoly. Since media oligopolies support a lack of diversity in perspectives and thus reinforce a dominant cultural perspective, individuals are subject to a form of censorship” (195).
• “Lilburn (2007) poses a key question ‘should the focus of information literacy teaching be on giving students the tools and skills needed to work around conditions that impose barriers to access to information, or should the focus be shifted and expanded to address and directly confront those conditions’” (196).
• “Cope urges a ‘collective questioning of how information is constructed, disseminated, and understood’ and that ‘certain sources are ‘authoritative’ because authorities have decided they are’” (197).

“Critical Legal Information Literacy: Legal Information as a Social Construct” Yasmin Sokkar Harker
• “Since the 1970 publication of Paulo Freire’s seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Freire and other educational theorists have developed a philosophy of education called critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy seeks to use education as a tool for overcoming social injustice by promoting critical thinking and change in the world. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970), Freire critiques prevailing models of education, particularly the ‘banking concept,’ and argues that instead of encouraging passivity . . . educators should engage in ‘problem-posing education,’ [which] presents material for student consideration, and encourages them to critically perceive how they themselves exist in relation to it. Students are then able to perceive the world as continuously in transformation and understand their own potential to participate in its transformation” (206).
• “Students often perceive case law as a body of information that represents every decision made by the judiciary and assume that all judicial decisions set precedents. While this is true for the US Supreme Court and other state supreme courts, it is not true for the lower court decisions. / Lower courts practice selective publication, which means that the judges decide whether or not they want to submit a decision for publication” (214).

“Information—Power to the People: Students and Librarians Dialoguing about Power, Social Justice, and Information” Amanda J. Swygart-Hobaugh
• According to Luke and Kapitzke, critical theory includes “‘social construction and cultural authority of knowledge; the political economies of knowledge ownership and control; [and] the development of local communities’ and cultures’ capacity to critique and construct knowledge’” (219).
• “As Jacobs (2008) argues, librarians need to engage in a pedagogical praxis of information literacy wherein we ‘emphasiz[e] the democratizing and social justice elements inherent in information literacy’ and bring to the forefront of our teaching that ‘information literacy . . . also encompasses . . . empowering people, promoting social inclusion, redressing disadvantage, and advancing the well-being of all in a global context’” (220).
• Questions for students:
o “What underlying factors do you see contributing to information poverty and the digital divide in the US and worldwide?
o When looking at the statistics re: differences of Internet access between different groups, states, and countries, was there anything that surprised you? Do you see similar or different trends when we examine literacy?
o How do InternetForEveryone.org organization’s goals resonate with the social justice frameworks?” (225).

“Information Literacy and Service-Learning: Creating Powerful Synergies” Christopher Sweet
• “Our great land-grant institutions as conceived by John Morrill and Abraham Lincoln were based on a ‘Public University’ model that would teach a more practical curriculum in service of the nation. Teaching students to recognize and redress social injustices was for a long

[Lynne Nunyabidness · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm still new to the concept of critical librarianship, so I thought this volume would present a background into the theory as well as provide ideas for incorporating these ideas into practice. For the most part, the book did that. Some of the chapters were heavier with opinion than practical suggestions, but I found them informational nonetheless. Part of the time my head swam with all of the theory being tossed at me, but most of the time it was explained or could be deciphered based on context. Not many chapters involved assessment of activities at the level one would see in a traditional peer-reviewed publication, which was sort of what I was expecting of the book. However, considering the criticism of formal assessment lying within critlib as a whole, I guess I shouldn't be shocked. Definitely a worthwhile read if you're interested about the intersection of info lit and social justice. However, before you do, read Accardi, Drabinski, and Kumbier's Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods, because almost every essay in here references it.

[Derek Moser · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow.
This was legit awesome. Great read. Superb combination of social justice themes and critical information literacy paradigms. Loved it.
Also, the editors organized the order of articles really well.
While not every article was pragmatically helpful for the context I find myself in, every article was thought provoking, regardless of one's current context. Can't ask for much more.

[amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

necessary -- if imperfect -- reading.

[Reading Fish · Rating 4 out of 5]

inspiring book on information literacy

[ACRL]

Read by ACRL Member of the Week Piper Martin. Learn more about Piper on the ACRL Insider Blog.

[Mills College Library]

028.7 I435 2013

[A]

Interesting, although I had a hard time connecting with several of the chapters. However, I still found it well worth the read.