Call for Applicants: ACRL/NY 2025 Symposium Scholarships

ACRL/NY is now accepting applications for scholarships to attend our 2025 Symposium

Pleasure and Play: Finding Joy in LIS Work

The 2025 ACRL/NY Annual Symposium

“Pleasure activism asserts that we all need and deserve pleasure and that our social structures must reflect this. In this moment, we must prioritize the pleasure of those most impacted by oppression.

Pleasure activists seek to understand and learn from the politics and power dynamics inside of everything that makes us feel good.”
adrienne maree brown in Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good (2019)

“To be sure, players are thinkers; but they also are movers. This combination leads to acts of doing and making—not only of objects of many types but also of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Involvement in such activity produces more than intellectual discernment. It leads to excitement, fun, and, perhaps in its most sublime manifestations, joy.”
Henricks, T. S. (2020). Play Studies: A Brief History. American Journal of Play, 12(2), 114–155.

It seems like every day a new disaster begins as older ones fester. Through compounding environmental and social abandonment, structural racism and inequality, war and genocide, and disappearing higher education budgets, we are still asked to show up at work.

In light of everything that feels bad in the world, ACRL/NY’s 2025 symposium theme asks: what feels good in LIS? How do we find joy, or at least contentment, in our jobs? Let’s indulge together and learn from our library pleasures. Using Adrienne Maree Brown’s 2019 book Pleasure Activism and the practice of play as jumping off points, let's talk about how feeling good might make us more thoughtful, effective, values-driven, or justice-oriented LIS practitioners. We also welcome critiques of the idea of joy at work and the productive tensions between work under capitalism and finding joy in work.

Presented annually by the New York Metropolitan Chapter of the Association of College and Research Libraries, this year’s event will take place Friday, December 5, 2025, 8:30 AM - 4:00 PM at Fordham University – Lincoln Center Campus

Scholarship awardees will receive:

• A waiver of registration fees for the ACRL/NY 2025 Annual Symposium
• A free 1-year membership to ACRL/NY (benefits include Mentoring Program, discussion group events, and professional development opportunities)
• A copy of the book, Pleasure ActivismThe Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown  
• A $75 gift certificate for the Strand Book Store, to be redeemed online or in-person 

If you are interested, please note that ACRL/NY offers three scholarship programs.

Student Scholarship – For students currently enrolled in graduate degree programs in library/information science who are considering a career in academic librarianship (three awardees). To Apply: fill out this student scholarship form

Early Career Librarian Scholarship – For an academic librarian who has been practicing less than five years following receipt of a master’s degree in library/information science (one awardee). To Apply: fill out this early career librarian scholarship form

The Dr. Barbara Bonous-Smit Scholarship – For an academic librarian who has been in practice at least five years following receipt of a master’s degree in library/information science (one awardee). To Apply: fill out this Dr. Barbara Bonous-Smit scholarship form

Scholarship recipients are expected to produce a short article on their impressions of the Symposium for the ACRL/NY blog (guidelines to be provided).

Application submission deadline: Monday, November 10, 2025 at Midnight

Scholarship recipients will be notified by Monday, November 17, 2025

Questions? Contact us at scholarships@acrlny.org

For further information about the symposium, check out our web site.

We look forward to your submission.