Library Faculty Publications and Presentations
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Papers and presentations given by Queen's librarians at conferences, symposia and workshops.
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Item Decolonizing librarians teaching practice: In search of a process and a pathwayLaverty, Corinne; Berish, FrancineMany educators across post-secondary institutions are learning about their colonial histories and the need to decolonize curriculum, learning materials, and teaching practice described in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: Calls to Action (2015). This qualitative study explored the meaning of decolonizing with a group of ten instruction librarians at a mid-sized Canadian institution. The project was conducted as a learning program for predominantly white settler librarians. It provided an opportunity to document a learning process and a pathway to initiate change. A five-month learning program uncovered participant questions and interpretations of decolonizing drawing on transcripts of individual learning journals and a focus group as the data set. The program inspired a community of practice enabling the learning and unlearning essential to decolonizing. We report, from the perspective of two white settler librarians, on the meaning of decolonizing as an ongoing process that enables awareness of colonization, personal identity, and positionality and includes strategies librarians can use on the path to decolonizing teaching, collections, and spaces. Participant self-awareness surfaced a critical librarianship mindset where information is understood as a product shaped by cultural, historical, social, and political forces, and where we acknowledge that academic libraries and their information sources and systems are not neutral and empower specific voices.Item Beyond the Paywall: Advocacy, Infrastructure, and the Future of Open Access in CanadaSwartz, Mark; Goodchild, Meghan; Shannon, MeaghanDespite the best of intentions and tireless efforts, we see an Open Access movement that is experiencing complications characterized by inequity, high costs, and bureaucratic burden, but also representing a significant improvement over the previous norms in research, teaching, and scholarly publishing. This shift is beneficial, transforming research and teaching in the academy and beyond, even if it does not always appear as such to those working on the ground level. In this chapter, we will describe this shift, outlining how it has impacted many crucial aspects of the research and teaching processes in Canada and highlighting both challenges and successes. We will finish with a look to the future by providing recommendations for government, universities, and for researchers themselves.Item Resisting Surveillance in Scholarly Publishing(2024-05-30) Swartz, Mark; McElroy, Kelly; Slaght, GraemeThis presentation connects the concepts of surveillance capitalism, surveillance publishing, and the citation economy, mobilising scholars, librarians, and participants in library publishing towards viable alternatives. A small number of companies with dominance over academic publishing capture and use the surplus value created through the publishing lifecycle. This extraction – of academic labour, of information – is reinvested into proprietary data analytics products. This can be both literally, as the data collected by the publishing side can be incorporated into data analytics algorithms, but also financially, as the profit margins of these academic publishing arms have long been astonishingly high. Crucially, these profits, in turn, have been used to expand these companies’ portfolios of extractive data services across various industries, as academic publishers transition from information vendors to technology-driven data brokers. By providing their labour directly or indirectly to these companies, scholars are supporting data collection and analysis used for everything from advertising to law enforcement. This data is also sold back to universities who then use it to surveil the publishing practices of their employees, using proprietary metrics and methods counter to principles of academic freedom. All of this plays out against the backdrop of overlapping crises. In higher education, adjunctification, the erosion of academic freedom, and increasingly commercial models of education further burden faculty in terms of their scholarship. In addition, the data brokers who now own the majority of academic publishing venues sell data analytics products incorporating personal data to a range of state and private actors, such as Clarivate’s contract with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. As has been well-demonstrated, the impact of increased surveillance disproportionately affects minoritized communities. The presentation was delivered at the 2024 Surveillance Studies Network Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and contributed to the research project titled "Resisting Surveillance in Scholarly Publishing." https://trianglesci.org/tag/resisting-surveillance-in-scholarly-publishing/Item Search Hedge for South Asian Diaspora populationRoss-White, Amanda; Gupta, Nikita; Rana, GurpreetItem Gold Standard Articles on South Asian Diaspora(2024-03-12)