Call for Proposals/Contributions for Emergent Strategy in Library Instruction: Stories, Reflections, and Imaginings

Working Title: Emergent Strategy in Library Instruction: Stories, Reflections, and Imaginings

Editors: Leah Morin and Hazel McClure

Submission Deadline: June 21, 2024

Publisher: Library Juice Press

Book Description

Have you ever experienced a teaching moment where a subtle shift in attention or a choice to value presence over the plan resulted in an unexpectedly meaningful learning experience? You were likely engaging in emergent strategy, and we invite you to share your story and voice in a new collection, Emergent Strategy in Library Instruction, anticipated in 2026 from Library Juice Press.

Background

adrienne marie brown’s emergent strategy is a feminist, afrofuturist exploration of human relationships, responses to change, and our capacity to dream for more just and beautiful futures. These concepts naturally align with library instruction, allowing students to learn through information and integrate it into new knowledge, understanding, and action.

Principles of Emergent Strategy

The principles of emergent strategy, as outlined in brown’s works, are summarized as follows:

• Change is constant. Be like water.
• Small is good, small is all. The large is a reflection of the small.
• Less prep, more presence.
• What you pay attention to grows.
• There is a conversation in the room that only these people in this moment can have. Find it.
• Move at the speed of trust: focus on critical connection more than critical mass.
• Trust the people. If you trust them, they become trustworthy.
• Never a failure, always a lesson.
• There is always enough time for the right work.

Call for Contributions

We invite submissions of varying lengths, genres, and formats, including but not limited to:

• Stories
• Lesson plans
• Curricula
• Doodles/Sketches
• Creative writing (poetry, song, flash fiction)
• Scholarly writing
• Interviews/conversations

In all pieces, we encourage authors to demonstrate the connection to emergent strategy and how this approach led to learning.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit your story or idea using the provided form by June 21, 2024. Submissions should be accompanied by a brief abstract outlining the proposed content.

About the Editors

Leah Morin (she/her) is an Information Literacy Librarian at Michigan State University, focusing on first-year writing students. Her research interests include incorporating the feminist ethic of care and emergent strategy concepts into teaching.

Hazel McClure (she/her) serves as the Head of Liberal Arts Programs at Grand Valley State University. Her scholarship explores high-impact practices, information literacy, collaboration with faculty, and teaching information literacy in professional writing contexts.

Contact and Submission

For questions and submissions, please contact the editors via email at editors.emergentstrategy@gmail.com. Submissions can be made using the provided form: Submission Form Link

Call for Chapter Proposals

Working Title: Information, Power, and Reproductive Health
Editors: Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (Des Moines University); Alanna Aiko Moore (University of California, San Diego); Renée Ann Rau (University of Southern California)
Submission Deadline: April 1, 2023
Publisher: Library Juice Press

Book Description

Information, Power, and Reproductive Health will encourage readers to explore the inextricable intersection of reproductive health information and power. Rooted in a framework of reproductive justice, it will explore the ways in which power plays a central role in how reproductive health information is created, controlled, withheld, and shared. Deeply entrenched ideologies about which bodies are deserving or undeserving of reproductive care, which facets of reproductive life are worthy of research, which issues are taboo or frequently dismissed, and how to control bodies considered unruly all affect what health information is easily accessible or perhaps hidden from those who need it. Legislative, bureaucratic, medical-scientific, economic, and familial systems and structures shape reproductive health information, and framing information production and consumption as a social act can help us to trace these structural and ideological forces in the reproductive health landscape and locate transgressive sites of information sharing that speak back to power. Chapters will address the continued and more-urgent-than-ever interest in reproductive health, feminism(s), womanism, critical theory, and praxis in librarianship and information studies. We aim to develop an essential volume for librarians, healthcare practitioners, academics, advocates, and activists involved in the study of or street-level organizing around reproductive health in this critical era of reproductive crisis.

We seek proposals that demonstrate a substantive exploration of power and intersectionality, with attention to race, gender, sexuality, class, (dis)ability, and the like. We welcome all genres, from empirical research and critical analysis to personal narrative and autoethnography (and everything in between).

We welcome submissions from first-time authors and authors working outside academia. In the spirit of community, contributors will have the opportunity to be in regular contact with editors and with each other throughout the writing and publication process. Authors will also have the opportunity to both review and have their work reviewed by fellow contributors.

Potential Topics Include (but are not limited to)

• The history of reproductive health information. For example:
  • Archival or library holdings
  • Close readings of historically influential resources
  • Lasting impacts of absent, erroneous, or discriminatory reproductive health information
  • Underground information-sharing networks of the past
• The reproductive body, information, and the state. For example:
  • Information in relation to biopower, population control, or pronatalism
  • Forced hysterectomies/sterilization
  • Government records
  • Legislation
  • Funding for reproductive health research
  • Various forms of state and corporate surveillance (e.g., period tracking apps)
• Reproductive health information and medical institutions. For example:
  • Medical records and medical classification
  • Pathologized bodies
  • Patient consent and information sharing
  • Medicalization of queer bodies
  • Medical technologies, fertility treatments, and assisted reproductive technology
  • Cultural competence and information sharing
  • Marginalized communities’ relationship(s) to the medical establishment
  • Capitalism/neoliberalism/racism/classism, etc., in medical institutions
• Health information and the taboo reproductive body. For example:
  • Deviations from the “normal” or “healthy” or “fertile” body
  • Heteronormative ideas regarding reproduction and parenthood
  • Reproductive information for people with disabilities or otherwise “unruly” bodies
  • Libraries providing access to “taboo” reproductive information and resources (e.g., tampons/pads, condoms, materials on menopause)
  • Access to reproductive health information for non-normative or queer individuals or families
• Taking control of reproductive health information post-Roe. For example:
  • Library and archival collections, services, and resources
  • (Radical) reproductive justice as information practice
  • Narrative medicine and storytelling
  • Zines and graphic medicine
  • Social media and information sharing
  • Underground information-sharing networks

Important Dates and Anticipated Timeline (subject to change)

• Office hour: March 1, 2023, 10:00 – 11:00 am PST. Join the Information, Power, and Reproductive Health editorial team for an informal office hour. Pop in to say hi and ask us your questions about the call for proposals.
• Proposal due date: April 1, 2023
• Notification of acceptance: May 1, 2023
• First draft due: September 1, 2023
• Anticipated publication date: 2025

How to Submit

Submit chapter proposals and brief author bio(s). Proposals should not exceed 500 words.

Due to the political climate and nature of the collection’s subject matter, we respect that some contributors might choose to publish anonymously or using a pseudonym. If you have questions or concerns, please contact us at info.power.rephealth (at) gmail (dot) com: info.power.rephealth@gmail.com.

About the Editors

Gina Schlesselman-Tarango (she/her) is a health sciences librarian at Des Moines University. She holds an undergraduate degree in Sociology/Anthropology from Drake University, a masters of Social Science with an emphasis on Women’s and Gender Studies from the University of Colorado Denver, and a masters of Library Science from the University of Denver. Her research interests include race and gender in librarianship, critical information literacy and peer learning in higher education, and the intersections of reproductive labor and information work. She is the editor of Topographies of Whiteness: Mapping Whiteness in LIS (Library Juice Press, 2017), has served as a journal editor and reviewer, authored peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, and presented at numerous library science, gender studies, and higher education venues. She lives in Iowa with her people, cats, and chickens, and is a doula-in-training.

Alanna Aiko Moore is the Librarian for Sociology, Ethnic Studies, and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. Alanna holds a bachelor of arts in Sociology/Anthropology and Gender Studies from Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR, and a master’s of Library and Information Science from Dominican University. Alanna has published book chapters and articles on queer parenting, cross cultural mentoring, emotional labor, activism, and issues affecting women of color librarians. She has worked in academic libraries for over 15 years and has presented at numerous conferences and organizations. Before librarianship, she worked at social justice-centered non-profits and community organizations.

Renée A. Rau is an Information Services Librarian at University of Southern California’s Norris Medical Library and the liaison to the Keck School of Medicine. She earned a Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) degree at San José State University (SJSU), in 2020. In 2017, she earned an MA in 20th-century United States history, specializing in women’s and gender history, from Washington State University (WSU). Her current research interests include: Evidence Based Practice and information literacy instruction; Graphic Medicine and health humanities; and diversity, equity, and inclusion in health sciences librarianship.

This call does not specifically mention archives, but it is an opportunity to integrate archives into the discussion.
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Call for Chapter Proposals

Working Title: Censorship Is a Drag: LGBTQ Materials and Programming Under Siege in Libraries
Editors: Jason D. Phillips and Jordan Ruud
Submission Deadline: April 1, 2023
Publisher: Library Juice Press

Book Description: Libraries, long tasked with defending intellectual freedom, find themselves under siege with threats of censorship for carrying gender/sexuality-related materials or holding LGBTQ-related events. Efforts to censor materials and control programming arguably threaten to have a chilling effect on libraries’ ability to carry out their core missions. We are soliciting contributions from across the library ecosystem exploring the significance of these threats and how librarians have responded, offering an intellectual and practical toolkit, in tandem with lessons with experience, to help libraries make their way through this new intellectual climate.

Topics under consideration might include:

• Censorship of programming
• Censorship of materials at any point in the acquisitions cycle
• Preemptive caution (anticipation of censorship struggles) exerting a chilling effect on intellectual freedom
• How classification can impede discoverability of controversial materials: “bibliographic invisibility”
• Visibility of LGBTQ topics in displays
• LGBTQ YA/children’s lit and its curricular role
• Safe spaces for digital scholarship
• The role and inclusion of LGBTQ materials, services, and outreach
• Responsive collection development policy to address potential challenges
• Administrative interference (campus, school, or public)
• Workplace protections for LGBTQ personnel or those involved in LGBTQ
  collection development/programming
• Information barriers creating a non-inclusive environment
• Building design as a barrier to vulnerable populations (trans people)
• Impact of LGBTQ materials and/or programming on student retention/mental health
• The erosion of tenure as a threat to protection of intellectual freedom
• Reflection on the role of LGBTQ materials as part of a collection, and as an aspect of overall library/campus DEI strategies
• Politicization of library funding

We welcome contributions discussing specific situations, and also reflections of a more general nature on the importance of, and threats to, intellectual freedom.

We ask authors interested in contributing to submit a proposal or abstract in our submission form:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1bP5Eo_GsMXuCBMNerSdgtS9hjUVqrfEEuwvEwrCR-mY/

Deadlines:

• April 1, 2023: abstracts due
• April 30, 2023: notification of acceptance
• September 1, 2023: drafts due
• December 1, 2023: final revisions due
• December 31, 2023: final submission of manuscript

Questions: If you have questions, please feel free to ask the editors: Jason D. Phillips (he/him) and Jordan Ruud (he/him)

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.

Working Title: Sexuality in Libraries
Editors: Brian Flaherty and Alana Kumbier
Publisher: Library Juice Press
Deadline for proposals: August 13, 2018

Access to information about sex, and platforms for sex education, have changed radically in the digital era. As curators and providers of information about sexuality, librarians have a responsibility to keep up with developments in both the types of information available, and the platforms on which that information is most readily accessible. In addition, sex is different: collecting and curating sex-related materials, as well as providing sex related information, are both fraught with a variety of issues including personal, political and religious values, age-appropriateness, censorship, and collection maintenance (less generously: vandalism).

This handbook will support professionals interested in developing critical approaches to work at the intersection of sex information, sexuality education, and librarianship. It is intended to help librarians build collections, recommend resources, and create a comfortable and supportive environment for patrons to do sex-related research. Our hope is that the collection will address how we can address issues of sexuality information in our teaching, cataloging, programming, and outreach.

Martha Cornog and Timothy Perper’s guide For Sex Education, See Librarian: A Guide to Issues and Resources (1996) is a key predecessor for this work, essential for understanding issues around sex information in libraries. We hope to build on its foundation by creating a resource that addresses the issues with the same breadth and intelligence, and to bring that information into the present. Among other things: discourses around gender and sexuality have changed; we have new vocabularies for sex, gender identity and expression, and orientation; the scope of sexuality education has changed to incorporate intersectional identities; porn and information literacy has become an essential facet of any discussion of sexuality information; and the legal and cultural discussion around sexuality and alternative sexualities has morphed to be almost unrecognizable to someone working in this area 20 years ago.

Perhaps more importantly, the media for delivering information – especially sexuality information – has changed entirely since the issue of sexuality information in libraries was comprehensively addressed. When For Sex Education…. was written (in 1995) the internet was just beginning to grow into the ubiquitous presence it is today, cell phones weren’t especially common, and nobody could even fathom a hand-held computer more powerful than the most expensive desk-top. The internet changed the way people access information in libraries, changed the role of librarian as curator of information, and made digital information literacy an essential component of librarianship. The proposed book aspires to address all of these issues in the context of sexuality information in libraries.

The work will begin with a collection of chapters authored by experts, addressing different aspects of sex information in libraries. Though authored by individual experts, the book is intended as a cohesive handbook on sexuality information in libraries.

Possible topics for chapters include, but are not limited to:
• The Role of Libraries in Sexuality Education
• History of Libraries and Sexuality Materials
• Sex Education: Past and Present
• Cataloging and Classification of Sexuality Materials
• Censorship of Sexuality Materials
• Special Collections: Sexuality-related Special Collections in Institutional Contexts
• Sexuality archives (including digital archives)
• Libraries as welcoming spaces
• Negotiating ethics, boundaries, identities and embodiments as librarians and sex educators Reference consultations and sexuality education
• Sex information and critical digital information literacy
• Joining sex education communities of practice
• Bringing particular theoretical or conceptual frames to the points at which librarians support access to sexual information and education (e.g., intersectionality, transgender theory, critical pedagogy)

Timeline:
CFP Distributed: Early June 2018
Deadline for chapter proposals and resource guide section editors: September 1, 2018
Notification of accepted proposals: November 15, 2018
First drafts due: May 17, 2019
Second drafts due: August 23, 2019
Final drafts due: November 1, 2019
Final editing & manuscript submission: December 2019 – January 2020

We encourage submissions from librarians and archivists, library and archives workers, and sexuality educators, scholars and activists. We also welcome perspectives from a variety of organizational and institutional contexts, including public libraries, academic libraries, special collections, archives, grassroots libraries and archives, community programs, and more.

Please email abstracts of up to 500 words to sexualityinlibraries (at) gmail (dot) com

For chapter proposals:
Abstracts for your proposed contribution should include the topic(s) you intend to cover, and a short biographical statement indicating your areas of subject expertise and/or experience relevant to the collection. You are welcome to submit multiple abstracts about different possible chapters. If your submission is tentatively accepted, the editors may request modifications. Material cannot be previously published.

Final chapters will be in the 4000-6000 word range.

About the editors:
Brian Flaherty is the instructional services librarian at Boston University School of Law. He is also the co-founder and co-director of Partners in Sex Education, teaching comprehensive sex education to middle school and high school youth in Greater Boston. He has written and edited sex education curricula, and presented at local and national conferences, including a keynote at the 2014 National Sex Education Conference, “Sex Mythbusters!”

Alana Kumbier is a research and instruction librarian at Hampshire College. They are the author of Ephemeral Material: Queering the Archive (Litwin Books 2014), a book about LGBTQ community archiving practices and methodologies. They are co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (Library Juice Press 2010), a foundational collection of essays on critical pedagogy and library instruction.

Please contact Brian and Alana at SexualityInLibraries@gmail.com with any questions.