Empowered to Name, Inspired to Act: Social Responsibility and Diversity as Calls to Action in the LIS Context

Social responsibility and diversity are two principle tenets of the field of library and information science (LIS), as defined by the American Library Association’s Core Values of Librarianship document, yet often remain on the margins of LIS education, leading to limited student engagement with these concepts and to limited faculty modeling of socially responsible interventions. In this paper, we take up the need to increase the role of both in articulating the values of diversity and social responsibility in LIS education, and argue the field should broaden to put LIS students and faculty in dialog with contemporary social issues of social inequality and injustice whenever possible. We also examine two specific cases of socially responsible activism spearheaded by LIS faculty and how these experiences shape, and are shaped by, curricular commitments to addressing the values of social responsibility and diversity in LIS in the classroom and through research. The development of a social responsibility orientation and skillset, along with literacies of diversity, we argue, leads to better-prepared practitioners and an LIS community that is more actively engaged with its environment. The impetus for students to act can be empowered by faculty modeling a commitment to social responsibility and diversity in their own professional lives

Through Google-Colored Glass(es): Design, Emotion, Class, and Wearables as Commodity and Control

This chapter discusses the implications of wearable technologies like Google Glass that function as a tool for occupying, commodifying, and profiting from the bio- logical, psychological, and emotional data of its wearers and those who fall within its gaze. We argue that Google Glass privileges an imaginary of unbridled exploration and intrusion into the physical and emotional space of others. Glass’s recognizable esthetic and outward-facing camera has elicited intense emotional response, partic- ularly when “exploration” has taken place in areas of San Francisco occupied by residents who were finding themselves priced out or evicted from their homes to make way for the techno-elite. We find that very few trade and popular press articles have focused on the failure of Glass along these dimensions, while the surveillance and class-based aspects of Google Glass are fundamental to an accurate rendering of the product’s trajectory and the public’s emotional response to this product. The goal of this chapter is to foreground dimensions of surveillance and economics, class and resistance, in the face of unending rollouts of new wearable products designed to integrate seamlessly with everyday life—for those, of course, who can afford them. Ultimately, we believe more nuanced, intersectional analyses of power along race, class, and gender must be at the forefront of future research on wearable technologies. Our goal is to raise important critiques of the commodification of emotions, and the expansion of the surveillance state vis-à-vis Google’s increasing and unrivaled information empire, the longstanding social costs of which have yet to be fully articulated

Black Lives Still Matter for LIS: An Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction highlights the articles in the special issue Library and Information Studies and the Mattering of Black Lives

Breakdown in the Smart City: Exploring Workarounds with Urban-sensing Practices and Technologies

Smart cities are now an established area of technological development and theoretical inquiry. Research on smart cities spans from investigations into its technological infrastructures and design scenarios, to critiques of its proposals for citizenship and sustainability. This article builds on this growing field, while at the same time accounting for expanded urban-sensing practices that take hold through citizen-sensing technologies. Detailing practice-based and participatory research that developed urban-sensing technologies for use in Southeast London, this article considers how the smart city as a large-scale and monolithic version of urban systems breaks down in practice to reveal much different concretizations of sensors, cities, and people. By working through the specific instances where sensor technologies required inventive workarounds to be setup and continue to operate, as well as moments of breakdown and maintenance where sensors required fixes or adjustments, this article argues that urban sensing can produce much different encounters with urban technologies through lived experiences. Rather than propose a “grassroots” approach to the smart city, however, this article instead suggests that the smart city as a figure for urban development be contested and even surpassed by attending to workarounds that account more fully for digital urban practices and technologies as they are formed and situated within urban projects and community initiatives

Broadening Exposure to Socio-Political Opinions via a Pushy Smart Home Device

Motivated by the effects of the filter bubble and echo chamber phenomena on social media, we developed a smart home device, Spkr, that unpredictably “pushes” socio-political discussion topics into the home. The device utilised trending Twitter discussions, categorised by their socio-political alignment, to present people with a purposefully assorted range of viewpoints. We deployed Spkr in 10 homes for 28 days with a diverse range of participants and interviewed them about their experiences. Our results show that Spkr presents a novel means of combating selective exposure to socio-political issues, providing participants with identifiably diverse viewpoints. Moreover, Spkr acted as a conversational prompt for discussion within the home, initiating collective processes and engaging those who would not often be involved in political discussions. We demonstrate how smart home assistants can be used as a catalyst for provocation by altering and pluralising political discussions within households

Geographical Information Systems: Mining Public Assets for Commercial Interests

This paper is a political economic critique and exploration of the ways that the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) industry has emerged and consolidated itself by buying, analyzing and selling spatial data mined from the Internet. This includes a look at the history of GIS research and development activities and the industries that are fueling these developments. One of the fastest growing sectors is data mining and information processing where companies that are able to capitalize on the flow of information through proprietary systems or public networks like the Internet, are accumulating great wealth. What is needed is an exploration of the ways that the GIS industry has emerged within this larger context, and consolidated itself. Public adoption and usage of GIS tools via the Internet is creating competitive tensions within the GIS industry and producing complex new partnerships. What is most critical to explore at this moment are the details of the industry, who it serves, and in whose interest. As GIS software projects are often the outgrowth of direct political and economic policy and funding, industry giants are afforded greater access to purchasing huge data sets and labor to analyze and re-sell it.unpublishe

Searching for black girls: old traditions in new media

Critical information scholars continue to demonstrate how technology and its narratives are shaped by and infused with values, that is, that it is not the result of the actions of impartial, disembodied, unpositioned agents. Technology consists of a set of social practices, situated within the dynamics of race, gender, class, and politics. Critiques of technology include the rhetoric around the digital divide, as if access, skills and connectivity are the primary issues, as well as critiques of the alleged neutrality of technology. These critiques, however, largely serve to depoliticize the ways that social systems of power are embedded in technology practices. The present study addresses the issue of Internet search, a seemingly neutral and non-politicized technology, to look deeply at how Google mediates access to information on racialized and gendered identities in biased ways. Situated within critical race studies and critical information studies, from a Black feminist perspective, my research shows that Google's search engine monopoly privileges problematic race and gender representations of Black women and girls, from the very first page of search results. Through content and critical discourse analysis, I explore the ways that race and gender are structured in the Google commercial search engine and how the results from keyword searches on terms like "Black girls" are symbolic, harmful, and familiar misrepresentations derived from traditional mass media and popular culture. This research also traces how gender and race are socially constructed and mutually constituted through library and information science traditions from which current web indexing systems are derived, with a specific focus on how "neutral" technologies foster dominant narratives that may reinforce oppressive social relations, particularly the pornification of Black women and girls

"Just Google It" : Algorithms of Oppression

Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble discusses her research into Google, a technology commonly thought of as a public resource free from commercial interest, and the ways in which it mediates public access to information in biased ways and permits problematic racial and gender misrepresentations.Non UBCUnreviewedFacultyResearche