The Role of the Practitioner in Curating LGBTQIA+ Safe Spaces in Libraries

Abstract

The LGBTQIA+ community has come under increasing hostility in the North America through policy and challenges to library holdings and funding. These challenges to professional jurisdiction have prompted renewed scrutiny of the library‐as‐institution's responsibility toward society and the LGBTQIA+ community specifically. Safe spaces for this community remains a nebulous and contested concept. This paper reports preliminary findings of conceptualizations of LGBTQIA+ safe spaces in scholarly and practitioner literature in library and information science. Undertaking a critical literature review, this work outlines conceptualizations of the librarian's role in cultivating safe spaces and contrasts the theme of safe spaces as consisting of in‐group safe spaces. This paper collocates discussions of sociocultural contexts informing the ideas within literature alongside critical appraisals of and tensions with lived experience of queer folks. Surfaced is the gap between the two bodies of knowledge and conceptual and practice‐oriented approaches to reduce this gap.