Seeking Social Justice in the ACRL Framework

The scope of this article is to address the possibilities and challenges librarians concerned with social justice may face when working with the ACRL Framework. While the Framework recognizes that information emerges from varied contexts that reflect uneven distributions of power, privilege, and authority, it is missing a cogent statement that connects information literacy to social justice. In this article, authors concerned with social justice and civic engagement will share their reflections on the Framework from a critical pedagogical and social justice orientation

Modernism, class and colonialism in Robert Noonan’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists

This essay explores Robert Noonan’s 1914 novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, as a work of Irish modernist fiction. Reading its fragmented narrative as a reflection of the author’s subaltern position as an Irish republican and socialist, it interprets Noonan’s work as the product of the anticolonial and class struggles in which he was involved. Its critique of capitalist and imperial hegemony and the assertions that suffering, injustice and violence are normal, natural or inevitable phenomena reflects the author’s frustration, anger and desperation. In this way the novel counters and decentres the bourgeois-imperial dynamic that was reflected in the textual stability of Victorian realism. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists is an uneasy text that is at once ruptured and uncertain of its own aesthetic status and conveys, through its shifting, episodic plot, the precariousness of a working-class existence permanently poised “on the brink of destitution.” © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Grou

‘Oh you pretty thing!’: How David Bowie ‘unlocked everybody’s inner queen’ in spite of the music press

The 1967 Sexual Offence Act decriminalised homosexual acts between men allowing gay men to discuss their sexuality in public. Few prominent popular musicians came-out until 1972 when David Bowie claimed that he was bisexual in an interview with Melody Maker. Music papers and Bowie had substantial cultural power: Bowie was a rising star and music papers recruited journalists who discussed and perpetuated social change. The subsequent conversation, however, reinforced negative stereotypes in constructing the queer subject and tried to safeguard commercial concerns due to the assumption that the market for popular music avoided queer music. This undermined arguments that associate permissive legislation with a permissive media and society, but, to some, representation alone empowered people and destabilised preconceptions about queer identity.Published versio