Tag Archives: propaganda

The Work We Have Always Needed to Do: A talk for LVAIC

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Abstract

“It might well be that at this point it is a cliche to point to what our experiences with COVID are teaching us and say ‘this was always the case, it is just even more apparent now.’  The struggles we encounter as teachers, students, and library workers confined to online environments are versions of struggles that existed already in those environments (but might not have been so widely felt), and also that were always the case in physical environments.  When we talk about the need for engagement, when we wonder what that looks like in Zoom, it bears remembering that those questions were relevant in classrooms and lecture halls.  This extremely online time in education is forcing us to ask, what is a teaching environment?  What is learning?  What is a library?  Where are the people?  Too often the easy “solution” offered to those concerned about engagement and interactivity are those of edtech surveillance, and the alleged promises of AI.  I want to talk about those promises, and the problems of reducing teaching, learning, and research to the numbers offered by edtech and library systems.”

That is the abstract I shared several months ago with the fine and kind people–Kelly Cannon, Carrie Baldwin-SoRelle, and Jess Denke– who invited me to speak with the Lehigh Valley Association for Independent Colleges group, for their symposium for library workers and faculty about information literacy.   The talk I ended up giving–and try to capture here– had some distance from that abstract, but I did end up talking at least a bit about surveillance, care, and our responsibilities to our colleagues and students that well pre-dates the pandemic emergency.

In the interest of care I want to position myself: I am a white woman, I am Cajun, I am of a settler people, and have spent my entire life in the US living on unceded occupied land of many different Indigenous people.  I am living and writing while on Cherokee and Catawba land, in what is now called North Carolina.  I would like to point you all to https://landback.org/donate/ and encourage you to contribute to efforts to get land back into Indigenous people’s hands.  I am donating part of my speaking fee to this organization.

It’s been a long time since March 2020 and since that time, that pandemic time kicked in, I have joined a large (and I think still growing) group of people who found it hard to get anything done beyond what had to be done.  I was privileged to be able to stay home, work from home, arrange for my kid to attend his last year of high school from home, and for my husband to also be able to work from our home.  So it might sound like whining when I say how difficult everything has been with this pall of death and neglect.  More than half a million Americans have died so far, and more will die still, and so many of these deaths were avoidable, if not for the neglect of our government in 2020, and the capitalist impulses now that continue to keep vaccines away from people who need them, and continue to put people at risk, nationally and globally.

So I’ve turned to podcasts to motivate and distract myself.  Sometimes it works.  I manage to clean the kitchen, or fold the laundry, or back when the only thing I could do to leave the house was go for a walk, I would listen while walking. I get to thank my daughter for introducing me to Not Another D&D podcast, a performance and Dungeons & Dragons play podcast that I’m still listening to and is responsible for me getting back into playing the game, which I last played when I was about 12.  Playing a lyncanthropic elf ranger has been an important part of my pandemic coping.

Podcasts were a way for me to engage with something without doomscrolling, and also without reading, because my ability to sit with a text and focus was destroyed, and is only slowly coming back.  In addition to D&D podcasts I’ve also been listening to You’re Wrong About, which started off as a “debunking” podcast about media coverage and misconceptions about things like the Satanic Panic, serial killers, and the so-called “obesity epidemic.”     

It was You’re Wrong About that reminded me about Jonestown, in Guyana and the massacre of just over 900 people there in November 1978.  Their cult leader, Jim Jones, gathered vulnerable people, including drug addicts and sex workers, and also idealists and activists who believed in the end to racial segregation.   In 1977 (and here I am quoting from the article Escape from Jonestown by Julia Scheeres) “New West magazine was about to publish an exposé portraying Jim Jones—by now a celebrated California powerbroker—as a charlatan who faked healings, swindled money from his followers, and fathered a son with an attractive acolyte. It was all true.”

“Few folks know that  Jim Jones was a civil rights leader in Indianapolis—integrating lunch counters and churches—and that the majority of his victims were African Americans who heeded his message of social equality. How terribly they were betrayed for believing in this dream.”

Once in Guyana members of the People’s Temple had their passports and money taken away, and they were stuck.  Jones had been talking about “revolutionary suicide” to his followers for years, but the visit of members of the media and a member of congress spurred him to finally follow through on those plans to kill his followers (and himself).

“They drank the Kool-aid”

If you listen to You’re Wrong About, or drill down into their source materials, you know that what the Jonestown people were offered to mask the taste of cyanide was grape flavor Flavor-Aid, not Kool-Aid brand.  But that’s not the point.  The phrase “Drank the Kool Aid” suggests the beginning of a journey into misinformation.  But for Jonestown people, it was the end.  It was their death.

“They drank the Kool-aid” is  a phrase I heard a lot during the Trump administration and continue to hear with regard to QAnon during the Biden administration, and anti-vaxx, anti-science during COVID paranoia.  But that phrase, as Julia Scheeres points out in her article, is an act of erasure and injustice. 

Jonestown was not a mass suicide but a mass murder, perpetuated by Jim Jones, who lied to and manipulated people based on his public vision for racial harmony, for the sake of his private vision of “a revolutionary suicide”

Once people were in Jonestown, they knew they were trapped, and no information was going to save them.  This was not an information literacy problem

Jim Jones’ victims drank the cyanide laced Flavor-aid, and many of them were forced to.  About a third of the victims were minors, and they were poisoned before the adults were.  And that was their end.  More information was not going to save them.  Protecting them from predators like Jim Jones would have.  Structural changes that would provide health and mental health care and civil rights–which were being fought for in the 1970s–would have.  

Using “drank the Kool-aid” as the beginning suggests that the important story is that of Jim Jones, of our learning about him and how he victimized people in the aftermath of the mass murder at Jonestown.  But the people Jim Jones victimized, and isolated from their families, and took down to Guyana with lies and then trapped there, they had stories, they were part of other people’s stories, and they cried, and drank, and died, and their stories ended.  

What that phrase “Drank the Kool-aid” signals neatly is the extent to which the speaker thinks the person in question is at fault for what they believe, and what happens to them because of it.  It signals the belief that people are rational, and that we might, if we give people enough of the “right kind” of information, prevent them from drinking the Kool-aid.  

Information alone cannot save us from the problems of QAnon, or science denialism.  Exposure to peer-reviewed articles will not necessarily debunk conspiracy theories about vaccines, because people do not encounter information in a vacuum.  They encounter information via their networks of trusted people–of family, of friends, of perceived experts who were recommended by people in that network.

The lies that are told by cult leaders and propagandists benefit someone.  Who benefits from the lies, even when they are told knowing they are lies?  Who suffers when the lies are told? Who isn’t harmed enough by the lies to work to change things?  Whiteness, white supremacy, is implicated in the lies being told now about voter fraud, the lies that led to anti-voter legislation in (for example) the state of Georgia and that are being advanced by legislatures in several more states across the country.  The stories of voter fraud are told because they are useful for the political agenda of people interested in suppressing votes, especially the votes of Black people in the US.

People are not rational.  This is a problem anthropologists have long had with economics, the extent to which that field treats people as “rational actors:” predictable, subject to particular laws of behavior, and responding identically to circumstances as and when they change.  People are not rational.

They are “relational”

Abeba Birhane defines and describes the need for relational ethics in AI, and I think that need applies well beyond AI:  

“At the heart of relational ethics is the need to ground key concepts such as ethics, justice, knowledge, bias, and fairness in context, history, and an engaging epistemology. Fundamental to this is the need to shift over from prioritizing rationality as of primary importance to the supremacy of relationality.”

Libraries have a long and troubled history with rationality at the core of its practices.  What I think that phrase, “Drank the Kool-aid” also demands in terms of what I’m thinking about rational approaches to information literacy, and what it can and can’t do, is the importance of relationships.  People and relationships are vital to how and why people move through the information landscape, which is always changing.  And the extent to which people have agency in any given information landscape is down to who they are, what kind of power they have, and the structures that surround them that constrain their ability to make decisions on their own behalf.

Tressie McMillan Cottom said at ACRL 2021 that we value particular information because we value the people from whom that information came.  I would extend that, or add to it, or put along sideways the point that we also tend to value the stories of the people who we value.  Whose stories we value informs the way that the Jonestown massacre is remembered, in the disconnected turn of phrase, “Drank the Kool-aid.”   Whose stories we value helps explain why throughout the Trump administration we kept hearing the stories of his voters, of “anxious whites” and why they voted the way they did, why the dapper white supremacist was a character in new stories not exclusively, but especially after 2016.  Whose stories we value informs the current (as of May 19 2021) coverage of the Israeli attacks on Palestinians in Gaza, current US policy on that occupation, and who we decide to listen to.

I appreciate this commentary on Twitter from Shea Swauger:  “to be clear, information literacy will NOT fix racism, sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, classism, ableism, islamophobia, capitalism, colonialism, structural oppression, or white supremacy”

This definitely reflects my own thinking about information literacy.  

Attempting any classification of sources into “reliable” or “unreliable” cannot be the substitute for building relationships with people.  And this line of thinking is not new, the one that says we cannot rely on checklists to save us from misinformation and lies.  Kevin Seeber was writing about this in 2017, and this by Carrie Wade is from 2018.  

“Beyond the nouns and the verbs of “fact-checking” and “media literacy” and all of the advertisements and marketing materials we have at our disposal, what this discourse fails to acknowledge is the ways that knowledge is socially constructed. As libraries we cannot rely on better websites to solve political problems.”

Mike Caulfield, in his work around disinformation, suggests that we help students decide who deserves their time before “going down a rabbit hole” —the more time you give misinformation, the more it distracts you from constructive and productive work/life/play.  I think we should spend less time debunking and more time shunning.  Information is surrounded by and embedded in the relationships people have with each other, and their intent towards each other in sharing information.  Even people we do not know personally are in relationships with us, structurally.  It’s worth asking, if my relationship with that piece of information is via the white supremacist organization that shared it, what obligation do I have to break that information down, or can I disengage from that particular stream, because I recognize the toxicity of the organization sharing it?

I would point here to the work emerging from UNC’s Center for Information, Technology, and Public Life, in particular the critical disinformation studies syllabus, which offers us a way of structuring our approach to information that centers people, structures, and power.    

If you think you can be and should be useful to people in terms of helping them navigate information and misinformation, you need to be a person to them first.  So cultivating presence is central to that relationship building.

Relationship building is difficult in any circumstance, and it can be especially difficult when trying to engage entirely online when you are accustomed to doing it in physical spaces.  There are many ways of being human online, and very few of them involve lists of dos and don’t, and questionnaires about information provenance.  Being human, in a library context, is challenging when the library worker presence is predominantly in one-shot instruction sessions, or online tutorials about how to use the library web sites to get to “reliable” sources (I know you know this).  

Nicole Pagowsky notes that, in fact, doing one-shots can contribute to misunderstanding how to navigate information, and also misunderstand the library.  

“The way we engage in teaching within one-shot models, and the associated expectations for measurement, both keep us in a holding pattern of reactionary yes-people unable to enact our own agency within campus power structures.”

One-shots happen in the absence of a meaningful relationship between library workers and teaching faculty, in situations where valuing how many students you are “in contact” with, or who encounter the library in those sessions, is prioritized over embedding work and selves into the processes of education, and building relationships, trusted connections that students can then call on as they navigate their education.  Transactional library experiences, reducing information evaluation to a list of tasks, obscure the larger work that we should be responsible for.

Being extremely online can make it hard to literally see people in the internet (think about all the anxiety about cameras on/off in Zoom-based teaching)–it requires a new definition of “presence” that those privileged enough to get to be in rooms and buildings have assumed meant “in the same physical place”–engagement never was a guarantee.  Think about newspapers, naps, distracted gazing out of windows in class.  Lack of engagement is not new.  What it looks like might be.

Covid and the pandemic emergency has led to a massive and not entirely voluntary movement to online teaching and learning practices.  Those who were not already “extremely online” were confronted with the reality of digital as a place, not just a tool or a distraction or a repository for content.  

If digital is a place where we teach, and we hope that students learn, what kind of place are we in?  What is a classroom?  Is it Zoom?  Is it Moodle, or Canvas?  What is a learning space?  What is a library?

Libraries have been confronting “what is a library” for a while now–it has never been just a building, or a collection of databases, but also a network of people, a collection of expertise, a node for a college or university community to connect with in the course of doing, analyzing, and disseminating academic work.  

Some universities and colleges have had the luxury of not examining what a classroom or a lecture hall is in physical spaces.  Private universities in the US have had the particular privilege of making central to their student experiences the physical, the co-location of students and faculty and facilities in a way that assumes connection and engagement.  Oxford and Cambridge in the UK have a similar advantage, and make similar assumptions.

Large state institutions, and community colleges have not always had that luxury.  That doesn’t mean that their physical campuses were critically examined, but that they have had to be more online, or in other ways more attuned to the distanced needs of (for example) commuter students, or students who cannot, because of life circumstances (the needs of their families, the needs of their bodies) prioritize physical presence on campus as a part of their educational experience.  This is similar to the situation that individual people experience when they need to turn to online/distanced relationships to make up for what they cannot or are not experiencing in their own face to face/physical spaces:  queer kids growing up in politically conservative contexts; Black, brown, and Indigenous people teaching in predominantly white institutions.  To assume that it is impossible to build relationships in online only spaces is to be operating under assumptions generated in contexts where it’s easy to build relationships in physical spaces, because you are surrounded by people who recognize you as part of their community.

We have always needed to do the work of recognizing that co-location is not the same thing as engagement.

And it is a concern for engagement, for evidence of student participation that drives the market for edtech surveillance and learning analytics.  Educators and administrators are being sold the idea that if you count the clicks, if you track the eye movements, if you swipe in with cards at instructional library sessions, that you get a meaningful number that tells you something about engagement, about learning.

Think about what counts as Engagement on Facebook:  clicks and controversy.  

Karen Hao report ed in MIT Technology Review just this past March (2021)

“The algorithms that underpin Facebook’s business weren’t created to filter out what was false or inflammatory; they were designed to make people share and engage with as much content as possible by showing them things they were most likely to be outraged or titillated by.”

That is not the kind of engagement we are going for instructionally, but the number of clicks and time spent “on task” is the kind that Learning Management Systems collect.  Collecting and counting clicks is collecting proxy data for learning, much like checklists serve as problematic proxies for the work of information literacy.  It’s not effective, and not representative of the work we or our students need to do.

What is the work of the library for, and is it information literacy?

What is the work of the university for, and is it information literacy?

What about knowledge, its production, its navigation, its analysis?

This Spring I taught an ethnographic methods class, and we approached the topic with the lens of the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, in particular her Decolonizing Methodologies book.   She notes throughout the book the importance of relationships, and the ways that indigenous researchers are responsible to their own networks even before they begin researching.  Smith wants Indigenous researchers to ask the following questions about any given research project, and I think they are good practice for any researcher:

“Who defined the research problem

For whom is this study worthy and relevant?  Who says so?

What knowledge will the community gain from this study?

What knowledge will the researcher gain from this study?

What are some likely positive outcomes from this study?

What are some possible negative outcomes?

How can the negative outcomes be eliminated?

To whom is the researcher accountable?”

(2012, pp175-76)

I also had my students read Marisa Elena Duarte and Miranda Belarde-Lewis on library cataloging practices and Indigenous knowledge, and they have very similar things to say about the importance of building and maintaining relationships to indigenous scholars with each other, and to the people who they are hoping to learn from.  

I interviewed several of my anthropologist colleagues as guest lectures (in soundfile/podcast form) for this class, so that my students could hear the voices of anthropologists who are not me–it’s a practice I’ll continue even if I ever teach in physical classrooms again.  More than one of them made the point that to be able to do the work that you find important and interesting, you need to start with what is important to the people you hope to learn from.  You might end up realizing that the project you wanted to do isn’t the one you should do.  You might find that you are stuck organizing the broom closet for a month before anyone will have an unguarded conversation with you.  You do this work to build relationships, because your goal should not be extractive, for people to give you information, but for your work to have meaning to them, and for you to be humans to each other, not just potential transactions.

Smith, Duarte, and Belarde-Lewis all write about knowledges, the importance of knowing whose knowledge, and in relation to whose other knowledges.  Indigenous knowledge  and its production is historically erased or bounded within Western interpretation of that knowledge–those processes are social, and require social analysis (and a power analysis), not just fact checking.

In their respective works, Smith, and Duarte and Belarde-Lewis highlight the importance of relationships, of trust, of creating places where Indigenous people can connect with each other, with their own priorities, and produce knowledge by and for and of themselves, not just in relation to the knowledges and structures imposed on them by colonization and the controlling processes of them.  There is a lot that non-Indigenous people need to learn from Indigenous people and traditions, there’s a lot of listening we need to do, but today I want to point to this as one thing we need to pay much more attention to when we worry about things like “information literacy.”  

Sam Popovich notes that in LIS, the opposite of knowledge is defined as error, which then might theoretically be “fixed” with more information.  

“Library leadership view the opposite of knowledge to be error (correctable by more knowledge), and so ideology—knowledge in the service of power—is automatically excluded. By excluding the concept of ideology from any consideration of intellectual freedom, people can be wrong but they can never be collectively implicated in structures of false knowledge. The result is that intellectual freedom remains understood solely as an individual concern, and the role of libraries at most to correct error, but never to engage in the relationships between knowledge, false ideas, and power.”

Knowledges are created from many places, and generated in the context of information being produced by and passed on by people.  And our reactions to information, and navigation of various kinds of knowledge, are informed by our relationships to the people we associate with the information.  So in our current situation where misinformation is rampant and putting public health at risk, we need to sit with the likelihood that more information is not going to fix things.    

Several years ago I participated in the Visitors and Residents project, researching student info seeking behavior.  We interviewed first year students who often cited their parents, their friends, roommates, as people they talked to while doing their class papers.  It wasn’t until their second or third year that they started citing professors, and occasionally library workers.  Why?

Because those people were no longer strangers to them

My  current research during the pandemic involves interviewing students  as a part of a Jisc project in the UK, and what they are telling me they miss in the pandemic is interactivity.  They say they want to be on campus in lecture halls, so they can talk to their lecturers before and after class,  So that their professors can see their faces and maybe tell when they are confused and pause, or explain, or repeat themselves.  They want to be able to meet with classmates in the library, or in cafes, to talk, and connect, and “have fun” as a part of their going to university.  They talk about how hard it is to feel engaged online if all there is is content delivery/recorded lectures or uploaded articles in the course management system.  

And they clearly assume that the interactivity would be happening more in physical spaces, because they have experienced how hard it is for interactivity to be programmed into university experiences that still prioritize content delivery in digital contexts.  This is not to say such interactivity is impossible (think about online gaming, messageboards, dating sites–online interactivity is everywhere!)–just that universities are clearly experiencing barriers to providing it.  One of those might be their failure to fund full-time expertise in online environments.  

It’s possible to do this work, of building connections online–one example of people with expertise trying to help can be found in the work of  Mia Zamora, Maha Bali, and Autumm Caines at Equity Unbound.  

Attendance alone has never been evidence that your students were learning.  It was all the other things that happen in classrooms, and out of classrooms.  It was always stuff you couldn’t see.  We have never been able to bear witness to all of the processes that contribute to students’ learning.  So, why should we try now?

We are coping, poorly, with what is out of our control (the pandemic, our labor situation, our students’ attention) with the idea that we could control and capture some of what is going on, via surveillance and analytics.

But:  control is not care.

Control is not teaching.

And active learning and teaching practice shows us that it is in the letting go of our control that we can effectively curate environments for learning that are generative, just, and caring.

So we need to not mistake student engagement with systems (like presence in the LMS, or library catalogs) for student engagement with processes.  And need to think about what we could be offering students instead of what Jeffrey Moro has called “cop shit:”

“Like any product, cop shit claims to solve a problem. We might express that problem like this: the work of managing a classroom, at all its levels, is increasingly complex and fraught, full of poorly defined standards, distractions to our students’ attentions, and new opportunities for grift. Cop shit, so cop shit argues, solves these problems by bringing order to the classroom. Cop shit defines parameters. Cop shit ensures compliance. Cop shit gives students and teachers alike instant feedback in the form of legible metrics.”

You need to be human to students and colleagues, and they need to be human to you.  That means no dehumanizing practices in already challenging spaces.  No proctoring, No AI, no predictive analytics, no “engagement metrics.”  These numbers and metrics give the illusion of knowledge.

The work of our classrooms, and our libraries, digital and otherwise, needs to be at least as much around relationship building as it is around information wrangling.  And in building those relationships we can move towards collaborative models of scholarship and teaching, where no one person is the Star of the Show, but where we as a team can provide the kind of environments our students need, and that we need too, for critical and effective scholarly practices.

This is not a “silver lining” but work we have always needed to do.  The responsibility for us as instructors and educators is to have and gather information about these systems on behalf of our students, so that we might refuse on their behalf.  We cannot expect students to do all of the work of protecting themselves from unnecessary quantification and surveillance, from their position.  Where we have power, we need to use it for them.  And for our precarious and adjunct colleagues who do not have access to the power to refuse.

I’d point to this example of refusal from Dearborn, MI as inspiration for what is possible.  

Think about:  are you who work in the library embedded in relationships across campus that make you part of the trusted network of students and faculty?  

Which people are used to and comfortable with the things we needed to change, and who want to “go back” to that place of comfort for them?  Whose comfort is determinative in our choices going forward?  Whose discomfort doesn’t matter?  Which student voices are heard, when talking about whether we “should” be back on campus, or even what “on campus” means?  Which people did we always need to listen to more?

The motivation of information literacy work cannot be “the value of libraries”–one-shots are not a measure of importance, and might in fact be the opposite.  The motivations need to be the needs of your community and especially the most vulnerable.  We need to care for our communities more than we care about the library.

An institutional agenda that is built on social justice and Black feminist ethics of care requires paying attention to the impact of misinformation on people’s lives, not both-sidesing things via debate or “neutral” free speech platforming.

Because who gets to speak is historically about who has the power to be speaking.  And we need to start reframing our attention around who should be heard.   Rodrigo Ochigame writes of liberation theology in LIS and notes:  

“The remarkable innovation of the Brazilian liberation theologians is that they moved beyond a narrow focus on free speech and toward a politics of audibility. The theologians understood that the problem is not just whether one is free to speak, but whose voices one can hear and which listeners one’s voice can reach. “

One of the points I am trying to make is that even when we get to be back in physical spaces together, we need to continue to do the work of building and maintaining relationships, and recognizing and engaging with knowledges, not just information.  And we need to listen to vulnerable people, we need to listen to the people for whom the systems in which we operate were not originally built.  We always needed to be listening to disabled people when they told us what they needed.  We historically have not, or have done the minimum to be ADA compliant.   We always needed to listen to Black women, when they told us what white supremacy was doing to students, to communities, to our entire country.  We historically have not, because misogynoir is a powerful force.  We have always needed to listen to the “firsts” at universities, and not approach them as the ones with the deficit to be remedied.  We should hear them as the ones who can tell us what universities should be doing to support students, but don’t, because universities are built for students privileged enough to be OK without that institutional support.

So many people have died since March 2020.  In the US alone we have lost more than half a million people, and so many of those people should still be here, these deaths were largely preventable.  And before the pandemic people were dying, especially Black people, from police violence, and medical malpractice, and the impact of racism on their health, and ability to move freely through the world.  We cannot value Black people, brown people, or Indigenous people only once their story has ended, or when it contains trauma.  

The information we value, and the knowledges we recognize, are generated by people we value, and also about people we value. 

This is work, even with all the chaos around us, that we always should have been doing.  Whatever else has changed, and will change, that work and the need for it will not.

So what are we going to do?

Sources:

Birhane, Abeba. (2021) “Algorithmic injustice: a relational ethics approach” Patterns, 2(2)

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patter.2021.100205

Caines, Autumm (2021) “The Weaponization of Care”  Real Life.   May 24.

https://reallifemag.com/the-weaponization-of-care/

Caulfield, Mike (2019)  “SIFT:  The Four Moves”  (Blog post).  June 19.

Critical Disinformation Studies (syllabus) 

https://citap.unc.edu/research/critical-disinfo/

Duarte, Marisa Elena & Miranda Belarde-Lewis (2015) Imagining: Creating Spaces for Indigenous Ontologies, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 53:5-6, 677-702 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2015.1018396

Ellenwood, David (2020)  “  Information has Value:  The Political Economy of Information Capitalism”  In the Library with the Lead Pipe, Aug 19.

http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2020/information-has-value-the-political-economy-of-information-capitalism/

Hao, Karen (2021)   “How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation“  MIT Technology Review, March 11.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/

Kreiss, Daniel and Shannon McGregor “Polarization Isn’t America’s Biggest Problem—or Facebook’s” Wired, April 5, 2021 https://www.wired.com/story/polarization-isnt-americas-biggest-problem-or-facebooks/

Moro, Jeffrey (2020) “Against Cop Shit”  (blog post) 13 February.  https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/2020-02-13-against-cop-shit/ 

Ochigame, Rodrigo (2020)  “Informatics of the Oppressed”  Logic, Issue 11 (Care), August. 

https://logicmag.io/care/informatics-of-the-oppressed/

Pagowsky, N. (2021). The Contested One-Shot: Deconstructing Power Structures to Imagine New Futures. College & Research Libraries, 82(3), 300. doi:https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.82.3.300 

https://crl.acrl.org/index.php/crl/article/view/24912

Popovich, Sam (2021)  “Canadian Librarianship and the Politics of Recognition”  Partnership 16(1)

https://journal.lib.uoguelph.ca/index.php/perj/article/view/6126/6036

Sarah, and  Autumm Caines, Christopher Casey, Belen Garcia de Hurtado, Jessica Riviere, Alfonso Sintjago, Carla Vecchiola (2021)  “What Happens When You Close the Door on Remote Proctoring? Moving Toward Authentic Assessments with a People-Centered Approach”  Volume 39, Issue 3: Educational Development in the Time of Crises, Spring. 

https://doi.org/10.3998/tia.17063888.0039.308

Scheeres, Julia (2014) “Escape from Jonestown”  Longreads.  November 12.  

Seeber, Kevin (2018) “Teaching CRAAP to Robots:  Artificial Intelligence, False Binaries, and Implications for Information Literacy”  Critical Librarianship and Pedagogy Symposium, University of Arizona, November. 

https://kevinseeber.com/claps2018.pdf

(2017)  “Wiretaps and CRAAP”  (Blog post)  March 18.

https://kevinseeber.com/blog/wiretaps-and-craap/

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai   (2012)  Decolonizing Methodologies, second edition.  Zed Books:  London and New York.

Wade, Carrie (2020) “No Answers, Only Questions: The false fight against fake news”  (Blog post 576)  Sept 22.

https://seadoubleyew.com/576/no-answers-only-questions-the-false-fight-against-fake-news/

(2018) “I am not your Fake News Savior” (Blog post 150) March 8.

https://seadoubleyew.com/150/i-am-not-your-fake-news-savior/