Registration is now open for LACUNY Institute 2022 which will be held virtually on May 12th and 13th and hosted by the New York City College of Technology.
We have an amazing line up of speakers from across the U.S. and Canada. Check out the program in process (new sessions are still being added and a full schedule of events will be released shortly).
Our keynote speaker is Mariame Kaba, an organizer, educator, curator, and prison industrial complex (PIC) abolitionist who is active in movements for racial, gender, and transformative justice. Learn more about Mariame and her work.LACUNY Institute 2022 : “Built to Exclude: Confronting Issues of Equity and Otherness in Libraries.”
Library workers, patrons, and scholars are grappling with questions about what it means to have access, to belong, and to feel welcome and included. How do library environments and institutional norms–from the ways spaces are designed and collections are organized, to the language we use in classrooms and on digital platforms–potentially exclude historically marginalized populations or alienate patrons and workers with different cultural and racial, linguistic, and socio-economic backgrounds? How do conceptions of professionalism and issues of privilege, class, and power impact the experiences of library workers or present barriers to entry into our field? How can we confront encoded forms of discrimination that library workers and patrons face? Is it possible to transform institutional dynamics that are othering when we face bureaucratic obstacles, labor shortages, and austerity conditions? Who has the agency and resources to change library environments that are built to exclude?