Beyond Silos: Justice-Minded Conversations and Collaborations Across Contexts and Spaces - 2

• In Event: Beyond Silos: Justice-Minded Conversations and Collaborations Across Contexts and Spaces

Abstract

Panelist2 is an associate professor with a Master of Library Science Program in the College of Education at a university in North Carolina. Panelist2 has over 30 years of experience working in public and school library settings, focusing on library and information services (LIS) and community engagement with grades 6-12 and their educators and caregivers. Panelist2 has led multiple grant-funded research projects exploring how heritage-based knowledge systems impact library users’ information-seeking behaviors and literacy practices in daily life. Panelist2’s work contributes to critical librarianship discourse by investigating public libraries as collaborative communities of literacy practices and platforms for literacy justice for diverse and local/Indigenous communities. Panelist2 is equally interested in the social informatics of informal learning (i.e., critical theory as applied to social interactions) as well as public librarian communities of practice. Panelist2 is particularly interested in studying the evolution of librarian professional practices with reading practices under the influence of emerging technologies, having published actively and led multiple research projects in this area to report their research on librarian identity and ethos, librarian communities of practice, racism in LIS, and cultural heritage information behaviors.

Panelist2’s conceptual framework comes from a synthesis of inquiry-based learning (Muhammad, 2023) and critical theory in communities of practice (Evans et al., 2014). To operationalize this framework, Panelist2 has formed practitioner inquiry groups that invoke justice-oriented conversations and collaborations, leading librarians towards embracing justice-oriented practices in their workplaces of the educative and public spheres (Panelist2, 2022). Panelist2’s participation on this panel is to share outcomes from their research experiences with librarian practitioner inquiry groups that provide a story of the transformative ways in which moving beyond workplace silos provide reparative identity constructs for librarians as community-based educators (Panelist2, 2022). (286 words)

Author

• Vanessa Irvin, East Carolina University