Review: <em>Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across Disciplines</em> edited by Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, and John Buschman

Abstract

Critical Theory for Library and Information Science: Exploring the Social from Across Disciplines edited by Gloria J. Leckie, Lisa M. Given, and John Buschman. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2010. 326 pp. ISBN 978-1-59158-938-9. Critical Theory for Library and Information Science claims that information studies and its accompanying professions have largely neglected critical theory and that a more critical–theoretical approach is necessary for correcting epistemological assumptions within the field, particularly those relating to power and social justice. 1 In their Introduction, Leckie, Given, and Buschman cite three reasons for encouraging information studies to engage with critical theory: to oppose further incursion of neoliberal grand recit (such as the market or managerialism), to be more in tune with scholarship in other disciplines, and to enable sophisticated responses to current issues facing the field. This volume reflects a trend within information studies that questions the scientific and positivist views that have long dominated the field. It offers alternative methodologies for studying information phenomena, particularly those employed within the humanities and qualitative social sciences. In short, this volume represents an important and reasoned contribution at the advent of critical theory to metatheoretical discourse within information studies. The necessity of its intervention cannot be overstated. Leckie, Given, and Buschman’s volume introduces readers to a wide range of critical theorists, including such notable thinkers as Roland Barthes, Paulo Freire, Jacques Lacan, Martin Heidegger, Bruno Latour, Jean Lave, and Gayatri Spivak, to name only a few. The volume assembles roughly two dozen scholars within information studies to compile 23 essays, each of which explores the ideas of a particular critical theorist or theorists and the potential implication of their ideas for information studies. Perhaps the most remarkable accomplishment of this volume is the ability of its contributors to offer cogent, clear, and digestible summaries and examinations of complex ideas within critical theory. Each of the essays offers equally intelligible explanations of the potential interventions critical theory can make within information studies; to highlight only a few topics: new ways of thinking about classification and power, correctives to cognitive and psychoanalytic assumptions, a reexamination of everyday life information activities, the examination of social-constructivism on institutions and administration, a reexamination of the role of libraries and archives in the public sphere, and the centrality of representation and the benefit of humanistic methods to understanding cultural institutions. The volume in no way attempts to be a compendious study of all of critical theory’s potential for information studies; instead, it provides a concise examination of the ideas of those theorists who receive attention. That each of the contributors accomplishes such lucidity is not a