Safiya Umoja Noble

Social Justice as Topic and Tool: An Attempt to Transform an LIS Curriculum and Culture

Training culturally competent and socially responsible library and information science (LIS) professionals requires a blended approach that extends across curricula, professional practice, and research. Social justice can support these goals by serving as a topic of inquiry in LIS curricula as well as by providing a scholarly framework for understanding how power and privilege shape LIS institutions and professional practice. This article applies social justice as a topic and tool for transforming LIS curricula and culture by exploring the implementation of social justice–themed courses and an extracurricular reading group in one LIS department. Exploring curricular and extracurricular cases in a shared institutional setting contextualizes key challenges and conversations that can inform similar initiatives in other institutions. Transforming LIS culture to prioritize social justice values, epistemologies, and frameworks requires multivalent strategies, community buy-in, and shared responsibility in terms of the labor of leading and sustaining engagement with social justice.

Empowered to Name, Inspired to Act: Social Responsibility and Diversity as Calls to Action in the LIS Context

Social Responsibility and Diversity are two principal tenets of the field of library and information science (LIS) as defined by the American Library Association’s “Core Values of Librarianship” but that often remain on the margins of LIS education, leading to limited student engagement with these concepts and limited faculty modeling of socially responsible interventions. In this paper we take up the need to increase the role of both in articulating the Core Values of Diversity and Social Responsibility in LIS education and argue that the field should broaden to place LIS students and faculty in dialog with contemporary social issues of social inequality and injustice whenever possible. The paper also examines two specific cases of socially responsible activism spearheaded by LIS faculty and how these experiences shape, and are shaped by, curricular commitments to addressing the Values of Social Responsibility and Diversity in LIS in the classroom and through research. The development of a social responsibility orientation and skillset along with literacies of diversity, the paper argues, leads to better-prepared practitioners and an LIS community that is more actively engaged with its environment. The impetus for students to act can be empowered by faculty modeling a commitment to Social Responsibility and Diversity in their own professional lives.

Through Google-Colored Glass(es): Design, Emotion, Class, and Wearables as Commodity and Control

This paper discusses the implications of wearable technologies like Google Glass that function as a tool for occupying, commodifying, and profiting from the biological, psychological, and emotional data of its wearers and those who fall within its gaze. We argue that Google Glass privileges an imaginary of unbridled exploration and intrusion into the physical and emotional space of others. Glass’s recognizable esthetic and outward-facing camera has elicited intense emotional response, particularly when “exploration” has taken place in areas of San Francisco occupied by residents who were finding themselves priced out or evicted from their homes to make way for the techno-elite. We find that very few trade and popular press articles have focused on the failure of Glass along these dimensions, while the surveillance and class-based aspects of Google Glass are fundamental to an accurate rendering of the product’s trajectory and the public’s emotional response to this product. The goal of this chapter is to foreground dimensions of surveillance and economics, class and resistance, in the face of unending rollouts of new wearable products designed to integrate seamlessly with everyday life—for those, of course, who can afford them. Ultimately, we believe more nuanced, intersectional analyses of power along race, class, and gender must be at the forefront of future research on wearable technologies. Our goal is to raise important critiques of the commodification of emotions, and the expansion of the surveillance state vis-a-vis Google’s increasing and unrivaled information empire, the longstanding social costs of which have yet to be fully articulated.