Friday Plenary Speaker

Maura Seale is the History Librarian at the University of Michigan, providing research and instructional support for students and faculty in the History Department. Maura holds an M.S.I. from the University of Michigan School of Information, an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Minnesota, and a graduate certificate in Digital Public Humanities from George Mason University. Her research focuses on critical librarianship, library pedagogy, political economy and labor in libraries, and race and gender in libraries. She is the co-editor, with Karen P. Nicholson, of The Politics of Theory in the Practice of Critical Librarianship (2018), and is also co-editor of Creating Space for All Learners: Exploring Equitable and Inclusive Pedagogies. Her work can be found at www.mauraseale.org. 

Plenary Address: Critical Library Instruction and the Question of Labor    

Inspired by the LOEX conference theme, “Branching Out: Growing and Adapting Your Information Literacy Practice,” I reflect on my work as both a library instructor and scholar of critical library pedagogy. The emergence of critical library instruction has fundamentally reshaped library instruction, generally for the better for the students and faculty we work with. Spending so much time on what we teach, however, has led us to neglect how we teach - the material conditions in which we practice instruction. Critical library instruction, I argue, has failed until recently to adequately consider the question of librarian labor; any discussion of library instruction, I suggest, must begin with how we labor. I explore this question through recent critiques of critical library instruction, the discourse around AI, and relational teaching.

- Presentation text (.pdf)