ACRL/NY 2016 Symposium: Money and Power
Call for proposals
Economic, social, and political power affect the choices we all make as individuals and as institutions. The world of academic and research libraries is not exempt. Power and money determine who and what is included or excluded, affect our conscious and unconscious agendas, and can be used to further or hinder changes of many kinds. Yet as ever-present as these forces are, they are often assumed and unspoken. Let’s make the implicit explicit by directly addressing the undercurrents of money and power in academic and research libraries, so we can move forward together with productive analysis and action.
Some possible areas to consider:
• Labor and power in the library: adjuncts, faculty status and other signifiers of professionalism; collective bargaining;
• Budget decisions and funding strategies;
• Critiques of cataloging/metadata and the power to name;
• Power within discourse and scholarly communication: academic freedom; open access and questions of prestige; alt-metrics;
• Leveraging power to foster change within an institution;
• Power dynamics in the library classroom and at the reference desk; teaching critical information literacy and the social construction of authority;
• Sociopolitical hierarchies, including those based on race, class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, or disability that academic libraries replicate and/or challenge; and
• Sharing power in collaborations both within and outside our institutions.
The above list is not meant to represent the limits of the theme, but to serve as a catalyst for your ideas.
We are accepting submissions for:
• 50-minute solo presentations to be followed by a Q+A period
• 20-minute presentations that will be grouped into small panels by topic and followed by a moderated discussion
A call for posters will be announced at a later date.
Please submit an abstract of 250-550 words here. Deadline for submissions is March 25, 2016, with notification of acceptance in early May. Selected presenters must confirm by May 19.
The 2016 ACRL/NY Symposium will be held December 2, 2016 at the Vertical Campus at Baruch College, City University of New York.
* Hat tip to Robert Darnton via Maura Seale in Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods for an anecdote that inspired this theme.
Questions about the submission process may be addressed to acrlnysymposiumchair@gmail.com
