Register on Eventbrite: https://crtinlibraries.eventbrite.com

Join us for primer on Critical Race Theory in libraries followed by short presentations.

METRO Reference & Instruction Special Interest Group presents:

Critical Race Theory (CRT) stems from legal studies and aims to expose, critically analyze and, ultimately, eliminate systemic racism. In librarianship, applied CRT investigates our practices with a goal of dismantling white supremacy and the many ways it manifests in libraries, from our architectures, our collection development, to our teaching and learning practices.

We’d like to think together about how critical race theory informs our pedagogy and our practice.

We invite you to consider how we can integrate criticalities of race to our approaches to teaching and/or reference practice. How are we reifying power structures of racial inequity in library services, school, and staffing models? How do we continue to support ourselves, faculty, students, patrons, and the public? What do we need to keep doing? Start? Stop?

This METRO Reference & Instruction SIG event will be held March 4th, 2022. Let's build a collective discourse that will support practitioners from various institutional contexts and who come to this venture with varying levels of expertise!

Primer in Critical Race Theories in Libraries provided by Dr. Shaundra Walker

Shaundra Walker serves as Library Director at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia. She is also a tenured Associate Professor of Library Science. A native of Macon, Georgia, she earned a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership from Mercer University. Shaundra also holds a Master of Science in Library and Information Studies from Clark Atlanta University and a Bachelor of Arts in history from Spelman College.

A member of the American Library Association, the Association of College and Research Libraries, the Georgia Library Association (GLA), and GLA-Black Caucus, she was the recipient of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association/DEMCO Outstanding Librarian of the Year Award in 2020.

Her research interests include the recruitment and retention of librarians of color, organizational development within Minority Serving Institution (MSI) libraries, and critical librarianship. Shaundra regularly speaks on issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion in library science. Her most recent book chapter, “Ann Allen Shockley: An Activist Librarian for Black Special Collections,” appears in Knowledge Justice: Disrupting Library and Information Studies through Critical Race Theory, edited by Sofia Y. Leung and Jorge R. López-McKnight (MIT Press, 2021). She is co-editor of The Black Librarian in America: Reflections, Resistance, and Reawakening (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).