This article presents an insider view of engagement with critical librarianship in a higher education and arts library context. The gains from this engagement include a stronger voice in institutional dialogue and collaboration, and the development of exploratory practices in collection development and information literacy that are increasingly informed by critical perspectives.Our experiences and examples of emerging practise highlight some of the complexities and ambiguities of critical librarianship, around novelty, compliance, institutionalisation, and the challenge of how we convert these theoretical insights into the power structures at play in libraries and archives into meaningful changes for the benefit of all of our students.Ultimately the conclusion is that if we recognise these power structures, and the particular role of the library in knowledge production, consumption and validation, we must take critically informed action.
This article presents a case study of liberating reading lists through a staff-student collaboration in a UK arts university. It characterizes reading lists as a familiar but under researched feature of academic life and discusses their practical and symbolic role in maintaining Western / Eurocentric / White disciplinary canons, and how they inform what it means to be ‘well read’ in a discipline. The collaborative project, which was initiated as Liberate the Curriculum work, brought together students, academic staff and librarians to audit and review reading lists, and reimagine them to represent multiple narratives, reflecting the diverse and international student population of the university. The article explores the challenges of auditing reading lists and identifying more diverse resources, and the complex relationships between identity and knowledge production. The authors use Critical Race Theory to comment on the relationship between race, colonialism and the arts, and how racism is reproduced within the academic environment. The project methodology is described, with an evaluation of the project as a student staff collaboration, and the learning and impact within the institution.
Welcome to this special issue of the Art libraries journal, dedicated to critical art librarianship. For more than a decade, librarians in North America and elsewhere have increasingly engaged in the use of theory as a tool to question and redefine existing professional discourses and practices. In parallel, these critical approaches have also repositioned social justice as a core responsibility and goal of librarianship. The concepts of critical librarianship generally, and critical art librarianship in particular, are explored in this issue through multiple perspectives: theorisations, case studies and reflections, as well as accounts of activism.Many of the articles included here follow on from two recent conferences, 'Towards a critical (art) librarianship: theories and practices' held at
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