Abstract
The Medical Library Association recently announced its commitment to diversity and inclusion. While this is a positive start, critical librarianship takes the crucial concepts of diversity and inclusion one step further by advocating for social justice action and the dismantling of oppressive institutional structures, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Critical librarianship takes many forms, but, at its root, is focused on interrogating and disrupting inequitable systems, including changing racist cataloging rules, creating student-driven information literacy instruction, supporting inclusive and ethical publishing models, and rejecting the notion of libraries as neutral spaces. This article presents examples of the application of critical practice in libraries as well as ideas for applying critical librarianship to the health sciences.
Highlights
Critical librarianship, rooted in critical theory, is about applying principles of social justice to our work in libraries
In the past 100 #critlib Twitter chats, most of the topics were presented in an academic library context, with health sciences librarianship featured only once in a February 2017 conversation about “Business, professional, medical, health, & STEM education programs.”
107 (2) April 2019 jmla.mlanet.org and mandatory training around trauma-informed care and cultural humility [10] demonstrate an interest in these issues among the health care workforce
Summary
The Medical Library Association recently announced its commitment to diversity and inclusion. While this is a positive start, critical librarianship takes the crucial concepts of diversity and inclusion one step further by advocating for social justice action and the dismantling of oppressive institutional structures, including white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. Critical librarianship takes many forms, but, at its root, is focused on interrogating and disrupting inequitable systems, including changing racist cataloging rules, creating studentdriven information literacy instruction, supporting inclusive and ethical publishing models, and rejecting the notion of libraries as neutral spaces. This article presents examples of the application of critical practice in libraries as well as ideas for applying critical librarianship to the health sciences. This article has been approved for the Medical Library Association’s Independent Reading Program
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