The Death Positivity Movement (DPM) is a recent social and activist movement seeking to change the North American “culture of silence” surrounding death and dying. Seeking to engage with the conference theme of “conversations across boundaries,” this presentation presents arguments as to why libraries should be involved in the movement and also outlines more specifically actions that they can take to be involved. In this presentation, a short introduction to the DPM will be provided, followed by a brief discussion of the concept of the “good death”. Arguments will then be made explaining why libraries should be involved in the DPM and then the last section explores more specifically how libraries can be involved through collection development, community assistance and programming.
Despite Library and Information Science’s engagement with other matters of social justice, nearly no scholarly attention has been paid to fat issues within the library. Through the critical lens of the author’s own experiences as a fat Library and Information Science scholar, a critical discourse analysis of online library furniture catalogues reveals the exclusionary ways in which they perpetuate fatphobic body size standards. Given that library spaces are often considered a cornerstone of modern democratic societies, and that librarianship claims to champion ideals such as universal access to information, the exclusion of fat bodies in library spaces is problematic.
Drag Queen Story Time (DQST) is a public library program where drag queens lead a story time for children and families. Although this program is meant to celebrate diversity, the program can also invite an onslaught of political warfare against gender and sexuality nonconformity and intellectual freedom. This study analyzes the arguments of DQST challengers and supporters to better understand the motivations behind both negative and positive responses to this polarizing program. The study examines 406 publicly available letters written by community members, professionals, and vested organizations expressing opposition or support for a DQST that was hosted in a large library system in Canada, the Okanagan Regional Library (ORL) in 2019.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.