This call does not specify archives and is geared towards libraries, but there may be potential crossover.

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Call for Chapter Proposals:
Borders & belonging: Critical examinations of LIS approaches toward immigrants

Book Editor: Ana Ndumu
Publisher: Library Juice Press
Series: Critical Race Studies and Multiculturalism in LIS
Series Editors: Annie Pho and Rose L. Chou

Borders & belonging: Critical examinations of LIS approaches toward immigrants is a response to the need for discourse on how the LIS field, particularly in North America, is shaped by longstanding ideologies on nativity, race, ethnicity, language, class, and “belonging.” The goal is to probe concrete aspects of the LIS field (e.g., workforce, programs, facilities, resources, education and publications) and shed light on ethnocentric and essentialist frameworks. Here, an immigrant is defined as a person who permanently lives in but was born outside of the U.S. or Canada and respective territories. An immigrant is either a refugee, asylee, legal permanent resident, naturalized citizen or undocumented person. Please consult the editor about ideas involving international students.

Works should critically examine the role of immigration policy along with sociocultural paradigms in the library-immigrant relationship. Prospective authors are encouraged to refer to Mignolo & Walsh’s1 On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis along with Caidi, Allard, and Quirke’s2 Information practices of immigrants to develop their contributions.

Below is a sample, not exhaustive, list of topics:
• libraries and the promotion of assimilation or westernization
• linkages between libraries and colonialism and/or imperialism
• the role of libraries and information in mass migration and globalization
• immigrant self-determination versus structural inequality
• immigrant pre-migration information behavior
• immigrant contributions to information innovations (e.g., Silicon Valley, H-1B visa)
• presumptions of immigrant information incompetence and/or digital divides
• libraries and model minority narratives
• libraries and liberation rhetoric in the immigrant context
• libraries in sanctuary cities/states
• libraries in immigration detention centers
• libraries, privacy and the USA PATRIOT Act
• library services to specific immigrant groups (i.e., DACA recipients, TPS holders, religious minorities, forcefully displaced groups)
• nativism, populism, or xenophobia in libraries
• historical aspects of library services to immigrants
• gaps in immigrant information behavior research
• immigrants in the LIS workforce

Invited authors will complete 3,000 to 6,000 word chapters. LIS affiliates (LIS professionals, paraprofessionals, students and faculty) in the U.S. and Canada are encouraged to propose chapters. Chapters may be conceptual or empirical, exploratory or explanatory. All research methods are welcome. Case studies and literature reviews must draw from both migration/population studies and LIS literature. No previously submitted or published material.

Submissions:
Please email a 300-500 word proposal to Ana Ndumu at andumu@umd.edu by December 15, 2018. Proposals should include:
• Anticipated title
• Chapter rationale
• Brief outline
• Author(s) bio(s)

About Library Juice Press:
Library Juice Press, an imprint of Litwin Books, LLC, specializes in theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective, for an audience of professional librarians and students of library science. Topics include library philosophy, information policy, library activism, and in general anything that can be placed under the rubric of “critical studies in librarianship.”

About the Series:
The Critical Race Studies and Multiculturalism in LIS series collects and publishes works from theoretical, practical and personal perspectives that critically engage issues of race, ethnicity, cultural diversity and equity in library and information science (LIS). Works published in this series include:
• Pushing the Margins: Women of Color and Intersectionality in LIS, edited by Rose L. Chou and Annie Pho
• Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in Library and Information Science, edited by Gina Schlesselman-Tarango
• Teaching for Justice: Implementing Social Justice in the LIS Classroom, edited by Nicole A. Cooke and Miriam E. Sweeney

About the Editor:
Ana Ndumu is a researcher at the University of Maryland (UMD), College Park’s College of Information. She earned a Ph.D. in Information at Florida State University´s School of Information and explores the intersection of libraries, information and demography. She has completed studies on Black immigrants’ ICT device and Internet access; Black immigrants’ information behavior and experiences with information overload; the development of a scale for measuring and examining information overload as immigrant acculturative stress; and critical discourse analysis on LIS literature involving immigrants. Ana is a UMD President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Digital Library Federation (DLF) Futures Fellow.

1. Mignolo, Walter, and Catherine E Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, and Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.
2. Caidi, Nadia, Danielle Allard, and Lisa Quirke. “Information practices of immigrants.” Annual review of information science and technology 44, no. 1 (2010): 491-531.

This call is for academic librarians, and though it doesn’t specifically mention archives, the topic is relevant.

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Library Juice Press

We are inviting chapter proposals for the upcoming Library Juice Press publication tentatively titled Rethinking The Collector and the Collected: Perspectives on Decolonizing Area Studies Librarianship. This volume will explore the paradigm of “area studies” — a way of supporting regionally-focused collecting, processing, and liaison work — in the academic library through an explicitly anti-colonial lens. We will center debates on the politics and problems of area studies in libraries. Specifically, we ask how libraries are rethinking their approaches to collecting global resources and serving our constituencies in a contemporary and progressive manner. While libraries need to address the problematic nature of area studies, we see a larger academic trend in the push for “global” initiatives which ignore historically, linguistically, and culturally significant sites of difference, inequity, and asymmetrical power relations.

What does it mean to break down the artificial divide between “collectors” of knowledge and those of us who have these knowledges “collected” for use? What work is required to decolonize collections, collecting practices, and practices of access originally designed to help Euro-American scholars study “the other?”

Possible focuses for chapters include, but are not limited to:
– negotiating areas: the politics and history of delineating regions, places, and spaces;
– interdisciplinarity: exploring boundaries and relationships among academic disciplines and other interdisciplinary subjects such as women and gender studies, LGBT or queer studies, or environmental studies;
– funding and neoliberal history: looking at the relationship to governments, private funding, private capital, and the support of imperial and capitalist projects;
– collection development, acquisitions, and access: examining historical and current practices of acquiring materials and denying, limiting, or expanding the use of these materials through copyright, paywalls, or open access regimes;
– identity, professionalism, and training for library workers: centering the lived experiences of library workers, particularly librarians abroad, immigrants, and individuals from diaspora communities.

Accepted essays will offer a nuanced critique with solutions that go well beyond an erasure of difference. We are especially interested in soliciting chapters from writers of color, indigenous writers, or scholars from outside of the U.S. We also invite new translations of previously published work currently unavailable in English. Further, we invite work which operates from the assumption that hegemonic areas should be studied using the same tools, theories, and approaches as non-hegemonic areas — much like the precedents of whiteness studies and masculinity studies. Lastly, we plan to integrate peer review among authors into our process in addition to editorial review and ask that potential authors be willing to provide feedback on at least one fellow author’s material during the editing process.

Proposals should be no more than 300 words and describe the chapter, the framing and structure of the chapter and/or any theoretical frames necessary to the piece. Further, please indicate if the chapter would fit into any of the above focuses. If proposed work is a translation, please indicate if you are the original author or have the original author’s permission and provide the citation for the original. Please send proposal as a .docx attachment and in the body of the e-mail along with your CV and a short biography. Our deadline for proposals is December 15, 2018.

Please e-mail the editors at DecolonizingAreaStudies@gmail.com with any questions about the book including procedural questions or to ask about potential fit for your proposal.