April – May 2021, Online

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*Please note: Registration for each presentation will be capped at 275 guests. Any registrations over that amount will be put on a waiting list.

April 23, 12-1 pm MST – Indicators of Truly Epic Post-ness: Information Literacy, Authority, and the Contemporary Political Podcasting Ecosystem, Joel Blechinger

Both of LIS’ guiding documents on IL – 2000’s Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education and its more recent successor, 2016’s Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education – face significant challenges in the “wild west” of contemporary political podcasting. Specifically, political podcasting is where “authority” – as traditionally constructed and understood by LIS – is, I would like to argue, liquefied in quite radical ways. I will look closely at the right-wing conspiracist phenomenon QAnon, and how it has been analyzed across the spectrum of contemporary political podcasting to illustrate this brave new world of liquid authority.

April 30, 12-1 pm MST – Invited Presentation:The Intersectionality of Racism, Dr. Farha Shariff

Exploring intersectionality allows educators to dialogue around a set of questions that will lead them to a better sense of their students’ full selves, the challenges, the grace and the beauty that is needed to juggle multiple identities seamlessly, and how education and library and information sciences perpetuate injustice. The concept of intersectionality recognizes that people can be privileged in some ways and definitely not privileged in others. There are many different types of privilege, not just skin-color privilege, that impact the way people can move through the world or are discriminated against. These are all things you are born into, not things you earned, that afford you opportunities that others may not have. As Crenshaw (2016) asserts, “…many of our social justice problems like racism and sexism are often overlapping, creating multiple levels of social injustice.” When educators shy away from intersectionality, we shy away from fully ever knowing our students’ humanity and the richness of their identities.

May 7, 12-1 pm MST – Canadian Academic Librarians and Job Offer Negotiations, Paula Cardozo, Emma Scott, Mary Greenshields

This presentation will begin with a summary of the first survey ever conducted on the job offer negotiations of Canadian academic librarians. Like previous American studies, our results indicated that even in a female-populated profession, women are still less likely to negotiate than men; however, the lack of diversity within the profession makes it more difficult to gauge the impact race, gender identity, sexuality, and disability have on negotiation propensity and behaviour in Canada. Intersectional theory provides a useful backdrop to discuss connections and lacunas. While it is not the responsibility for any equity-seeking group to negotiate their way out of the wage gap, negotiation conversations can empower librarians in future employment offer negotiations to improve salaries and working conditions.  

May 14, 12-1 pm MST – Invited Presentation: Patron-Perpetrated Sexual Harassment in Libraries: Early Findings From a National Survey, Dr. Danielle Allard, Dr. Tami Oliphant, Angela Lieu

Patron-perpetrated Sexual Harassment (PPSH) is the sexual harassment of library workers by the very people they endeavor to support— library patrons. Despite growing calls within libraries and Library and Information Studies (LIS) to examine this issue, patron-perpetrated sexual harassment against library workers is largely ignored and research on this topic is noticeably lacking. The PPSH in libraries research project initiates conversation amongst LIS students, educators, library workers, administrators, and patrons to raise awareness about the pervasiveness of patron-perpetrated sexual harassment in libraries and to destigmatize and combat what we argue is a harmful yet “everyday” form of gender-based violence. In this presentation we will report on our early findings from a national survey completed by library workers across Canada about their experiences of PPSH in their workplaces.

May 28, 12-1 pm, MST – “The Entire Day is an Act of Restraint” : The Devaluing of Emotional Labour in Library Work, Dr. Joanne Rodger, Dr. Norene Erickson

Library work is emotional. As the increasingly social role of the library redefines expectations of service, the challenges of working in libraries become greater than ever. The American Library Association emphasizes the social, economic, and educational role of the 21^st century library to help solve social problems and add value to a community. This increase in social responsibilities is shown to have repercussions on library staff well-being, most notably as a result of the emotional labour performed by public service. Library work, like many public-service industries, involves emotional labour, which is the idea that one must regulate their emotions in order to accomplish their job. There are clear connections between the sociology of emotional labour and affective labour that has characterized library work and which describes the historical feminized profession of librarianship. This type of labour has been undervalued compared to intellectual labour, goes largely unrecognized economically, and is not typically seen as an asset to one’s job.