Leveraging social justice pedagogy to counter racism: Conceptualizing an Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals

Abstract

The goal of the Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals at St. John’s University (SJU) is to offer both current LIS practitioners and LIS students a curriculum explicitly grounded in social justice principles and concepts that builds and enhances capabilities to substantively counter racism and other challenges to social justice that are reflected in the information sphere of the 2020’s. This article reports on the contexts, motivations and considerations for developing the Certificate. Included is a brief overview of current courses related to social justice offered by ALA-accredited graduate programs in North America, and a list of thematic emphases based in social justice frameworks that will drive the Certificate upon its launch.

Keywords

Social justice LIS education antiracism pedagogy

1. The events of 2020 as context and motivation for action

The year 2020 will be remembered for many reasons, not least because systemic racism in American society became evermore apparent and widely reflected in the year’s fraught information sphere. As it was an election year in the United States, political campaigns were geared up in earnest after New Year’s Day. Many citizens noticed that early election statements and commentary from high-level candidates, pundits, and everyday people on social media and popular news outlets were vituperative and divisive, and often contained racist ideas (Anspach, 2020; Grueskin, 2020).

By February 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic had spread to the U.S., an event thoroughly covered in all information outlets. Because disease specialists initially had only a basic understanding of the COVID-19 virus, fearful citizens in hard-hit areas clamored for both information and action from their elected leadership. But instead of assuring their constituencies, enacting science-based pandemic strategies, and giving helpful advice, many government officials sent muddled, politicized messages and publicly squabbled over equipment shortages, interstate and international travel bans, face mask directives, and other proposals for dealing with the pandemic (Confessore et al., 2020).

Some elected leaders also discounted or openly denied the existence of the potentially deadly disease that was making thousands of Americans ill. Instead, they sought to shift public blame and attention onto China for the pandemic, calling it the “China Virus” or the “Wuhan Virus” (Burki, 2020; Pilkington, 2020). This intentional misinformation effort used politicized and racist rhetoric that suggested without evidence that Chinese people were somehow less susceptible to Coronavirus infection and were “dirty” or malicious and careless about spreading the virus. Subsequently, Chinese and other Asian populations in the U.S. soon began to report increased incidents of anti-Asian harassment and hate crimes (Gover et al., 2020). Public policy and official messages that might have mitigated fear and economic hardship were not forthcoming, and the pandemic and its associated health implications and social disruptions continued to spread due to inaction, disarray, and confusion.

By April, global information outlets reported that thousands of people were getting sick and dying in New York City, an early COVID-19 hot spot. Epidemiologists soon learned that Black and Latino New Yorkers were disproportionately affected by the Coronavirus. This was directly attributed to the fact that many Blacks and Latinos are subject to persistent economic inequalities and inadequate access to health care, which can be linked to systemic racism (Chotinier, 2020; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2019; Krieger et al., 1993). It was also noted that Black, Indigenous, and other People of Color (BIPOC) were more likely to be employed in “front line” occupations (e.g., grocery workers, caregivers, public transportation jobs) where work schedule flexibility and social distancing are not possible (Mays & Newman, 2020). As the Coronavirus spread to other parts of the country, BIPOC communities continued to be disproportionately affected by the pandemic’s resultant illnesses, economic disruptions, and child and elder care issues (Fortuna et al., 2020).

Also, that spring, high-profile media accounts of two police killings unleashed a torrent of public outrage, anguish, criticism and protest. A twenty-six-year-old Black woman, Breonna Taylor, was killed when three white Louisville, KY, plainclothes police officers fired 32 shots into her home on March 13, 2020. Police forced their way into her apartment just after midnight as a part of flawed investigation into a drug dealing operation run by Taylor’s former boyfriend (Duvall, 2020). Taylor was shot at least five times and bled to death in her hallway. She had no criminal record, and no illegal substances were found in her home (Callimachi, 2020).

Only weeks later, on May 25, 2020, George Floyd, a Black resident of Minneapolis, was killed by a white police officer who arrested Floyd for allegedly using a counterfeit $20 bill at a convenience store (BBC News, 2020). Captured video of this incident was disseminated widely via social media and global news outlets. The footage shows no evidence of Floyd resisting arrest. Floyd is seen handcuffed, face down in the street, and is repeatedly heard to cry out that he cannot breathe as one of the officers knelt on his neck for over 8 minutes (Hill et al., 2020). After Floyd lost consciousness, an ambulance was called to take him to a hospital where he was pronounced dead. An autopsy indicates Floyd died of “cardiopulmonary arrest complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck compression” (Reyes, et al., 2020).

News of this latest incident brought long-simmering racial tensions in America to a full boil; the social pressures of the year were at last too much to contain. Despite the overwhelming economic, mental, and physical tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic, and despite the danger of contracting the virus while among crowds, protests against the death of yet another BIPOC individual attributable to police violence prompted thousands of people to take to the streets all over the world (Taylor, 2020; Reuters, 2020). Floyd’s cry, “I can’t breathe!” became a slogan for this widespread public anger amidst the growing media profile of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protest movement (Hageman & Neuman, 2020). Subsequent legal proceedings in both the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd cases triggered additional protests against racism and police violence that continued throughout the year (CNN, 2020).

Against this contextual backdrop, and with our own campus and city under lockdown due to the pandemic, we the diverse LIS faculty and staff at St. John’s University began a series of introspective discussions with each other. We noted that the info-sphere and its users (our areas of academic research and teaching expertise) were reflecting some hard truths about American society. We observed deadly police violence against BIPOC, political division, incompetent and corrupt leadership, racist public rhetoric, public protest and counterprotest, a worldwide pandemic, and active misinformation campaigns about these issues. We acknowledged that systemic racism (and ignorance and/or denial of systemic racism) was undeniably demonstrated in a variety of information outlets. Collectively, we agreed that we as LIS educators can and must do our part to counter systemic racism by developing courses and programs that would provide future and current information professionals with tools to effectively confront racism and promote social justice.

Thus, we began to conceptualize the Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals. This paper reports on the exploratory processes and the thinking that led to proposing the Certificate to our university leadership and to our state education department for approval. Our hope is that documenting and sharing this progression will be useful to the work of LIS researchers, educators, practitioners, and students as they promote a healthier, more just society and counter the systematic racism that was made ever more apparent by information outlets during 2020.

1.1 A closer look at social justice, race, and the promotion of well-being in the LIS professions

We started this planning and development project by asking ourselves: what conceptual frameworks need to be considered in order to properly orient ourselves to the task of enhancing our anti-racist pedagogy? Because social justice has been the primary touchstone for our teaching, research, and service for many years, and because developing anti-racism pedagogy is clearly social justice work, we agreed that social justice frameworks and perspectives would also ground our efforts to develop the new Certificate.

We furthermore noted that The International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) has adopted language advocating a professional commitment to social justice. IFLA Statute 2.3.2 affirms “the belief that people, communities and organizations need universal and equitable access to information, ideas and works of imagination for their social, educational, cultural, democratic and economic well-being” (International Federation of Library Associations, 2008, p. 2). In an article commemorating of The World Day of Social Justice, IFLA also affirms that libraries are social justice institutions due to their two general goals of providing access to information and service to the community, particularly in the form of facilitating job skills development (International Federation of Library Associations, n.d.). The piece ends with a plea to information professionals, asking for “the recognition, the partnerships and the support” (p. 8) necessary to strengthen IFLA’s capacity to facilitate social justice.

The American Library Association (ALA) has also long adopted a social justice stance. It provides the iFields with a comprehensive list of resources, standards, and opportunities to get involved in efforts supporting equity, diversity, and inclusion across an array of professional activities. As the accrediting body for graduate LIS programs in the United States and Canada, ALA emphasizes the importance of pedagogy that builds social justice skills and competencies in two of its educational standards. The ALA also claims “equity, diversity, and inclusion” as “fundamental values” and lists diversity promotion among its “key action areas” (American Library Association, 2019; 2020).

Both IFLA and ALA prominently emphasize the need to equip new and experienced information professionals with comprehensive social justice training in order to bridge social inequities and build strategic coalitions with community partners to serve people from multicultural backgrounds. While we at SJU agree that it is essential to include the familiar concept of multiculturalism within LIS pedagogy, we acknowledge our colleagues’ opinion that aspirations for educating committed, culturally competent information professionals are incomplete without creating deeper understandings of race, privilege, and oppression which are necessary for bridging racial inequity in the information professions. For example, in her well-regarded work, “Trippin’ Over the Color Line”, Honma (2005) asserts that the LIS profession needs to continuously hone its strategies for bridging racial inequities in libraries. She recommends that LIS education programs adapt the social justice lens used by ethnic studies fields “to successfully theorize oppression and bridge the gap between [themselves] and communities of color” (p. 18).

Although academic discourse on social justice issues has significantly increased in recent years, Pawley (2006, p. 151) tells us that LIS scholars and practitioners have tended to avoid using “race” (the “R-word”) when discussing race. Furthermore, Van Scoy & Bright (2018, p. 295) perceive a resistance among LIS scholars to engage in “uncomfortable but critical conversations about race/ethnicity”. Until recently, LIS writers have instead preferred using “feel-good” phrases, such as “multiculturalism,” “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “equity” in their scholarly activities and professional practices; “race” has been obscured by these “feel-good” phrases (Peterson, 1995; p. 33). It is now acknowledged that progress based on thoughtful discourse about racial problems has been limited because the word “race” has been avoided (Mehra & Gray, 2020). Consequently, race remains understudied and poorly understood within the iFields as noted by Pawley (2006). Moreover, the failure to name “race” minimizes its significance. As a result, many multicultural diversity programs remain somewhat superficial (Peterson, 1996)

Because race plays a critical role in determining the advantages/disadvantages of certain groups over others, it is equally significant to understand the concept of privilege and its implications for both white people and people of color. While spirited debate and scholarly activities about under-privileged and marginalized populations continue, discussions about white privilege are not keeping pace in LIS discourse (Lipsitz, 2008). Even though white privilege is the most theorized type of privilege (Black & Stone, 2005; Leonardo, 2004), the LIS profession’s under-examination of this topic continues. In the absence of acknowledging and recognizing their privilege as the dominant culture group, it becomes challenging for white people to understand the societal realities of those who are not white. Furthermore, due to the LIS profession’s overwhelmingly white demographic, it remains an uphill battle to break the workforce’s perpetual homogeneity in the information profession. As a result, LIS workers remain predominantly white and often fail to reflect the populations of the communities they serve (Cooke, 2017b; Hill & Kumasi, 2011).

Our analysis of potential conceptual frameworks in which to ground the proposed Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals also focused on the promotion of societal well-being particularly in light of continuing paradigmatic shifts in how people access and consume information distributed in online environments. The rapid adoption of internet sources has coincided with a proliferation of poor-quality information (some of it intentionally misleading), often characterized in the political arena as “fake news.” Despite the term’s popularity in recent years, “fake news” has primarily escaped formal definition and it has been applied to everything from entirely fictional stories to those with a partisan angle (Wendling, 2018). Wardle and Derakshan (2017, p. 5), in their report for the Council of Europe, dubbed the phenomenon of mis-, dis-, and mal-information on the internet as “information disorder” Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about a new problem for information professionals in the form of an infodemic, which reflects the need to manage the staggering quantity of information, both accurate and inaccurate, that circulates during public health crises (Rothkopf, 2003).

Infodemics overwhelm people due to their inability to cope with the sheer quantity of information, which negatively impacts their well-being. Notions of societal and personal well-being are multifaceted concepts. Existing frameworks consider the experience of happiness, a sense of purpose, wisdom, coherent philosophy of life, achievement, pleasure, and love as essential indicators of well-being (McMahan & Estes, 2011). Information can significantly influence people’s feelings, moods, and emotions. Thus, information can make people happy, angry, sad, panicked, or accomplished, in addition to impacting their overall well-being. Saunders (2017) argues that therefore, it makes sense to consider the provision of access to the best available information as a social justice issue in LIS education and professional practice.

In order to combat the phenomenon of fake news in the contemporary info-sphere, LIS scholarship and pedagogy emphasizes the need to develop a variety of information literacies (e.g., critical information literacy, digital literacy, and media literacy skills) (Cheby, 2018; Cooke, 2017a; Finley et al., 2017; Leetaru, 2019; Lor, 2018). However, we note LIS’s currently limited pedagogy for developing educational programs and courses specifically designed to equip future information professionals with skills to design, develop, and deliver programs that would empower people to discern and deal with misinformation and fake news.

2. A snapshot of Social Justice Pedagogy in North American LIS programs

LIS educators have a robust tradition of sharing best practices and learning from colleagues as they continuously strive to improve course offerings (Association for Library and Information Science Education, n.d.). Thus, in addition to considering frameworks that can position and enhance our own program’s anti-racist and social justice pedagogy, we also sought to understand how our LIS educator colleagues at other universities were addressing social justice topics (including the countering of racism) in their professional preparation course offerings.

Cooke and Sweeney (2017, p. 7) observe that in LIS curricula, “there are many explicit definitions of social justice, some that lean more towards issues of diversity, others that emphasize human rights, and still others that promote radical action. The common thread through the definition is the desire to disrupt the status quo.” Even though the language and focus of “social justice” is diffuse in LIS discourse and practice, the term is successfully used in the iFields as a broad conceptual umbrella term to describe LIS practice, research, and pedagogy that counters racism and a host of other societal challenges (Rioux, 2017).

Keeping these broad conceptualizations of “social justice” in mind, in the autumn of 2020, we conducted a general exploration of online course descriptions at the 63 English-medium North American ALA-accredited graduate LIS programs. This effort was not intended to be a rigorous content analysis project. Rather, we sought to get a snapshot of general topical trends and current emphases regarding social justice in LIS graduate courses. This process served as an environmental scan that informed the development of our Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals. Ultimately, it was also quite inspirational for us.

We expected (and were able to confirm) that all of the examined programs cover standard LIS topics such as user advocacy, access to information, diversity, the digital divide, etc. in a core curriculum LIS foundations course. As our goal was to inform the development of our new Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals, we were especially interested in looking at our colleagues’ courses that explicitly focus on issues related to social justice (broadly defined) as indicated by course title or course description. Fifty-one (51) of the 63 programs we reviewed offered at least one course specifically related to social justice work in LIS. Summarized below are the topical trends in LIS social justice pedagogy that we observed.

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Topic: Resources and Services for Diverse/Multicultural Populations. The most frequently observed type of LIS course linked to social justice issues were those with an explicit focus on librarianship for diverse and/or multicultural populations. Twenty-three (23) programs included a course with a description or title that used the term “diverse”. The typical description of these “diverse populations” courses mentioned a goal of building skills among LIS professionals for facilitating the information needs of a number of varied groups, including the elderly and those with mental and physical disabilities. Description of courses that covered the “multicultural” facets of librarianship were also well-represented, with 14/63 of the observed LIS programs offering a course that concentrated on source selection and information services for people of various ethnic or racial backgrounds.
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Topic: Social Justice in LIS. Nine (9) of the 63 reviewed LIS programs offered courses about how social justice theory and conceptual frameworks are linked (or can be linked) to general LIS praxis. Some of these courses concentrated on the application of social justice frameworks to a specific subfield (e.g., archives and social justice, social justice-driven youth librarianship).
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Topic: Community/Social Informatics, Community Engagement. Eight (8) of the LIS programs under review offered courses addressing what are described as “community” or “social” concerns, with varied foci. Service to diverse populations, the use of information and communication technologies in specific communities, digital literacy and access for specific communities, and social variables related to a given group’s information access and use are mentioned in these courses’ descriptions
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Topic: Cross Cultural Communication and Cultural Competence. We noted that five (5) of the reviewed LIS programs offered courses in cultural competence or cross-cultural communication – a relatively small but important fraction of the examined curricula.
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Topic: International Librarianship. We counted four (4) LIS programs that listed courses that deal with issues of international librarianship. Description of these courses indicate overlap coverage of other social justicerelated issues, such as cultural competence, multiculturalism, and youth librarianship.
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Topic: Underrepresented/Underserved Groups. Five (5) reviewed programs listed specialized courses about social justice issues associated with information access and representation for underrepresented groups. Emphases varied, including “GLBTIQ Resources and Services”, “Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Library and Information Studies”, “Race, Gender, and Information Technology” or services for “indigenous” or “immigrant” populations.
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Topic: Misinformation. A few LIS programs (3) have addressed the topics of misinformation and fake news in their course offerings. While two (2) programs have listed a course specifically focused on fake news and misinformation, one (1) program has incorporated these topics peripherally into a course on information literacy.
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Topic: Social Work and Library and Information Science. Of the LIS programs examined in this exploration, two (2) offered a course on the topic of social workers collaborating with librarians.

In addition to stand-alone courses, thirteen (13) of the 51 LIS programs examined offered a Certificate or Specialization within a social justice milieu, and/or offered the ability to create a dual major within a Humanities discipline (e.g., Translation and Interpretation, Women’s Studies, Gender Studies).

Three (3) of the examined LIS programs gave students the opportunity to tie an MSLIS degree with a Master of Social Work (MSW) degree, which reflects how both disciplines share service values and welcome practice collaboration. These dual degree programs highlight the overlap in responsibilities and skills needed in both LIS and MSW professions, e.g., the ability to provide career and technological support and putting patrons/clients in touch with community resources and public services.

Crucially, thirteen (13) of the 63 accredited LIS programs examined do not appear to offer any specific courses related to social justice topics. Although these programs may cover social justice topics in a general way within foundations courses, and they may profess an institutional commitment to fairness, equity, and diversity, they do not appear to be following the distinct trend within LIS education to offer courses that are explicitly linked to social justice topics.
3. St. John’s University’s Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals

Next, we compared our own LIS department’s four (4) elective social justice-related course offerings with the social justice-related courses offered by our colleagues at other institutions. In terms of subject matter and total number, we found our courses to be in synch with currently observable trends in LIS social justice pedagogy:

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Materials and Services to Diverse Populations. This course emphasizes materials and services for diverse racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups, the aged, individuals with disabilities, and persons who cannot currently (or can no longer) read and/or write and/or access print or digitally-formatted information.
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Cultural Competence for Information Professionals. This course prepares students to work effectively at individual and organizational levels by learning and applying the cultural competence knowledge, skills, and practices required in culturally diverse environments.
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Social Justice in the Information Professions. This course promotes the use of social justice theory to critique organizational policies and information services (i.e., reference, cataloging, collection development, access to materials, public access computing, user studies, and evaluation) for traditionally under-served populations, including the physically challenged, the poor, senior citizens, citizens of developing countries, ethnic, religious, sexual, racial and linguistic minorities, etc.
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Fake News and Misinformation. This course emphasizes access to authoritative information as a social justice issue. Topics explored include the cognitive factors and emotional filters through which people process information, the evolution of fake news, intentional misinformation, and conspiracy theories and their implications for society.

As mentioned earlier, the LIS faculty at St. John’s University has long positioned its teaching, research, and service within social justice frameworks. Our four (4) stand-alone courses related to social justice are well received by our students and by area employers. As an academic community, we appreciate and are inspired by learning and working within social justice frameworks, and the language of social justice (along with the deep reflection required by these courses) allows LIS students to gain a clearer set of goals for their LIS career, i.e., to leverage their personal talents to provide a useful and relevant service as they reach out to others.

Yet as we reflected on the current info-sphere and the events of 2020, we realized that simply offering four (4) stand-alone elective courses was no longer sufficient if we wanted to strengthen our abilities as LIS educators to counter racism and promote social justice. It seemed we needed a more formal structure with clear underpinnings explicitly linked to social justice perspectives. At the same time, our previously described exploration of social justice, race, and well-being frameworks, along with our review of our colleagues’ social justice-linked pedagogy helped us identify some areas of opportunity for targeting anti-racist and social justice goals in our own teaching.

Thus, our thinking culminated in our proposal for a graduate-level Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals. Envisioned as a 12-credit Certificate program that can be taken as an LIS graduate student or as a current LIS practitioner, this structured course of study will be made up of our four (4) extant social justice courses. Because of the overlapping complexities of the topics at hand, these interrelated courses contain common elements that reinforce each other. Formerly free-standing electives, these courses will now be brought under a conceptual umbrella driven by the following themes:

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Race Consciousness and the Provision of Information Services
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Mitigating the Effects of Fake News and Misinformation
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Promoting Well-being in the Information Society
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Information Work Informed by Social Work

Race Consciousness and the Provision of Information Services. We have pointed out the numerous calls to bridge racial inequities and for recognizing and dismantling systemic racism in LIS. In light of the racially charged killing of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in 2020, the urgency for individuals and organizations to engage in difficult conversations about race is ever more apparent. In the proposed Certificate program, the topic of race in LIS will not be tempered by the “feel good” language of inclusivity and/or diversity. Instead, students will be provided with frameworks and contexts to understand existing racial inequities and power imbalances that exist within the LIS profession, the library workplace, and society as a whole. They will be challenged and encouraged to hone skills to bridge these gaps. Importantly, the Certificate courses will offer students a safe platform to have potentially uncomfortable conversations about race.

Furthermore, the courses will provide a solid knowledge base in intersectionality, cultural humility and intelligence, and cross-cultural communication. Our teaching will be grounded in antiracist pedagogical approaches so that students can safely explore race, privilege, power, oppression, and intersectionality within LIS contexts. Using self-reflection techniques and social justice analytical frameworks, emphasis will be placed on examining implicit bias, privilege, colorblind ideologies, microaggressions, and other issues related to race, racism, and the promotion of racial inequity within the information professions.

Fake News and Misinformation. The theme of fake news and misinformation addresses the observable negative impact on public well-being caused by divisive and racist political speech and intentional misinformation campaigns. Although LIS professional preparation programs may peripherally cover topics of fake news and misinformation in foundational courses, information literacy courses, and others, exploring the phenomena of fake news and misinformation within the interrelated perspectives of the four (4) social justice-linked Certificate courses allows for a more comprehensive understanding of these phenomena.

Among the goals of the Certificate is to equip information professionals with the necessary skills, strategies, and resources to create library programming that counters fake news, intentional misinformation, and conspiracy theories appearing in various forms of mass and social media. Facilitating access to authoritative information and teaching users to be discerning consumers of news will continuously be positioned in the Certificate courses as social justice imperatives for librarians.

Well-being in the Information Society. In addition to the negative cognitive loads associated with fake news, misinformation and conspiracy theories, we previously noted that individuals in today’s information society are often overwhelmed by the sheer quantity and rapid change of information. Moreover, the multidisciplinary growth of the field of infodemics (the study of measuring and managing large flows of both accurate an inaccurate information during societal crises) further bolsters the need for LIS professionals to keep user citizens’ well-being in mind (World Health Organization, 2020). This is particularly true regarding infodemics associated with racism-as-public-health-crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, natural disasters, and cultural/political unrest.

As part of a commitment to promoting well-being in the information society, courses in the Certificate program will include explorations of theoretical and practical questions of cultural literacy, cognitive and emotional variables involved in information seeking and use, information access, social rights, and systemic social change through a variety of social justice lenses.

The use of a social justice stance in the Certificate courses enables students to address citizens’ collective well-being by fostering public health, civic engagement, and the development of suitable programs and approaches that will empower people to navigate various channels to obtain the best information available on the pressing issues of the day as well as their everyday information needs.

Information Work Informed by Social Work. The theme of societal well-being overlaps with the theme of partnerships between the LIS and social work disciplines. Although the topic of social work is not strongly represented in our review of social justice-related courses in accredited LIS programs, social work has recently been recognized by LIS practitioners (particularly public librarians) as being a source of practical guidance (Lambert, 2020; Janis, 2018; Zettervall & Nienow, 2019), and social workers have been recently hired by a number of libraries (Aykanian et al., 2020; Public Library Association, n.d.; Provence, 2020; Johnson, 2019) to enhance public outreach efforts and make connections to other social service agencies.

Libraries serve diverse users, including marginalized populations with social service needs and varying information needs. This suggests that information professionals with social work skills and perspectives such as empathy, cultural humility, the worth of the person, personal dignity, and the importance of human relationships could serve their diverse communities more effectively at a broader level. Given the apparent synergies of LIS/social work partnerships, Certificate courses will include pedagogical modules on soft skills, public service and outreach, and cultural literacy considerations that originate from the field of social work.
4. Conclusion

During the overlapping social, political, health, and information crises of 2020, academic departments of all stripes released statements explicitly articulating their commitment to anti-racism and social justice and worked to ensure that these commitments are reflected in course offerings. As a part of this action, we the LIS faculty at SJU agreed that the best way to demonstrate and leverage our commitment to mitigating racial inequities and promoting social justice in both in the LIS profession and society at large would be to create an Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals.

Additional motivation to create the Certificate came about through a confluence of several trends in LIS as well as developments in cultural critique and awareness. For example, scholarly work over the last several years has attempted to build tools and frameworks to incorporate and enhance social justice thinking and praxis in public libraries, school libraries, and the field of librarianship as a whole (Mathiesen, 2015; Morales, Knowles, & Bourg, 2014; Rioux, 2010).

In light of these trends, we assert that LIS educators can and must play a critical role in dismantling systemic racism by developing courses and programs that would provide current and future information professionals opportunities to engage in difficult conversations about race, privilege, and oppression. Changing LIS discourse in the workplace and in the classroom is the first step to addressing the larger problems of racism within the LIS profession.

Furthermore, LIS programs’ multicultural courses need to take a deeper stance when addressing, identifying, and confronting race and promoting social justice within the LIS profession and society. The primary mission of information organizations is to serve and transform their communities; however, this cannot be done if future information professionals remain ill-equipped to suit the needs of the diverse communities for which they advocate (Overall, 2009). At the same time, it is critical to remember that merely celebrating diversity or multicultural events is not enough unless the conversation moves beyond access, collections, and services for a marginalized population. Conversations about social justice must start with addressing race, privilege, and intersectionality and their implications for the LIS workforce, as well as developing strategies to bridge gaps in prevailing power imbalances in the LIS profession.

Our goal for this paper was to highlight the confluence of factors that contributed to developing an Advanced Certificate in Social Justice for Information Professionals at St. John’s University. We hope that it encourages discussion and awareness of social justice and anti-racist pedagogy in our field. The Certificate proposal is currently being vetted through our university and state administrative processes. We hope to soon be able to report on our progress with this effort, and we look forward to engaging further with colleagues interested in social justice and anti-racist pedagogy.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

For their helpful encouragement with this project, we wish to thank our colleagues at the Division of Library and Information Science at St. John’s University: Christine Angel, Michael Crossfox, Shari Lee, Kristin Szylvian, and James Vorbach.

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