When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Commemorating Women’s History Month with TIE and Choice Content
TIE and Choice resources from the past year that spotlight women's history and achievements, including book reviews, podcast episodes, resource lists, and more.
Posted on March 10, 2025 in Blog Posts
Commemorating Women’s History Month
In honor of Women’s History Month, the Toward Inclusive Excellence team gathered TIE content and Choice resources from the past year that center women’s history, including feminist fiction, resources on women’s advancement in the workplace, and an archive of literature by and about Black women. Choice, the publisher of TIE and a publishing unit at the Association of College & Research Libraries, a division of the American Library Association, provides book reviews to help librarians identify academic sources and professional development tools like webinars, podcasts, and white papers.
Make sure to revisit this page throughout March for new content. We hope you find these selections helpful in your exploration of women’s rights, activism, and accomplishments.
Hot Topic
Hot Topic takes a deep dive into timely, significant, or niche topics guided by reviews over the decades. This collection looks at Toni Morrison’s literary legacy and impact.
Toni Morrison
TIE Blog
These selections include several TIE blog posts and resource lists elevating women researchers and intersectionality. To keep up with upcoming TIE content, subscribe to the TIE newsletter.
Blog Posts
Upgrading AI Dialogue: Prioritizing Women of Color Researchers
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become one of the most buzzworthy topics in recent years, grabbing the spotlight across various industries, from tech giants to academic institutions. As AI increasingly influences areas like health care and education, discussions about its potential and pitfalls are popping up everywhere. While it’s easy to celebrate AI’s innovations, we must confront the significant ethical challenges it poses, especially for marginalized communities. In this blog post, I aim to elevate the voices of women researchers who have raised crucial warnings about the dangers of AI bias and underscore why we need to pay close attention now, especially to those of us working in academic libraries. Drawing on critical research that reveals gaps in AI knowledge among library workers, we’ll explore how we can better engage with these issues and advocate for a more equitable future. Read the blog post.
Interviews
Returning guest Dr. Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University, discusses her new book, The Trouble of Color: An American Family Memoir. Using oral histories, letters, photographs, and family heirlooms, she goes beyond “official” archival documents to chronicle her family’s history of enslavement, evading anti-miscegenation laws, and leadership at the historically Black liberal arts college Bennett College. By looking at her family’s past, Martha seeks to understand her own Black identity and how her ancestors touched and crossed America’s color line. Read the interview with Martha.
TIE Talks with Linh Thủy Nguyễn
This TIE Talks interview features Linh Thủy Nguyễn, associate professor of American ethnic studies; adjunct associate professor of gender, women’s, and sexuality studies; and faculty associate in the Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas and the Harry Bridges Labor Center at the University of Washington. In this interview, she discusses her book Displacing Kinship, which explores how second-generation Vietnamese Americans contend with intergenerational trauma rooted in the legacies of the Vietnam War alongside the racism they experience as part of immigrant families attempting to assimilate into American life. Read the interview with Linh.
This TIE Talks features Kalindi Vora, Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies, and American Studies with an affiliate appointment in History of Science and Medicine at Yale University. Kalindi’s research sits at the intersections between science, technology, medicine, and inequality. Her projects include applying disability justice practices to studies of chronic illness, the ethics of the surrogacy process in India, and understanding bias in artificial intelligence tools. Kalindi discusses the utility of interdisciplinary scholarship, updates on her fascinating research, and the importance of mentorship in academia. Read the interview with Kalindi.
This interview features Dr. Marlee Bunch, an interdisciplinary educator, author, researcher, lifelong learner, and founder of the un/HUSH teaching framework. Dr. Bunch delves into the origins of how she developed the un/HUSH framework, which emerged from her research into oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, during the late twentieth century. Highlighting the importance of culturally responsive learning, she shares her plans for a pilot program featuring un/HUSH methods to reach a wider array of students and also discusses her upcoming book on how AI can be used for human-centered learning. Read the interview with Marlee.
This interview features Elena Guzman, Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Elena discusses what led to her research interests in Black ritual performance across the Caribbean and the African Diaspora and her work as an artist and filmmaker. She also chats about the intersections between the creative arts and scholarship, her upcoming title on Black Spiritual Borderlands, and the mission behind her co-founded feminist filmmaking collective Ethnocine. Read the interview with Elena.
Resource Lists
A Selection of Titles to Commemorate Intersectionality Awareness Month
Resources on Women’s Advancement in the Workplace
Forthcoming Academic Titles
Forthcoming Titles gathers the latest and soon-to-be-released publications in select disciplines. This list centers on upcoming titles in women’s and gender studies.
Forthcoming Titles in Women’s and Gender Studies, 2025
Ask an Archivist
Ask an Archivist is a monthly feature that explores the research and production behind compelling special collections through interviews with their curators, archivists, and directors. This interview features the Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.
Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books
In this interview, Lynne Farrington, Director of Programs/Senior Curator, Special Collections, in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, talks with Choice about the Joanna Banks Collection of African American Books. Lynne provides a fascinating overview of how Banks began collecting contemporary Black literature and explains the process of moving the collection to Penn Libraries. Lynne also details Banks’s involvement in the Black Womyns/Women’s Art Resource Collective (BWARC) and how the collection spotlights the larger Black literary community. Lynne further shares the Joanna Banks Collection’s applications in curricula and research, along with the curatorial process behind the 2020 exhibition, “Writing Across Genres: African American Women Writers in the Joanna Banks Collection.” Read the Ask an Archivist interview.
Featured Reviews
Featured Reviews consider how a title exposes racist systems and inequities or proposes means of dismantling them. These important works from valuable perspectives are of use to undergraduates, faculty, and anyone interested in learning more about racism and racial inequalities. These works include the life of American political figure Shirley Chisholm and “intersectional accounts of how race, class, and gender have collectively impacted the authors’ lives.”
The Personal Is Political: Eminent Sociologists Recount How Racism Impacted Their Lives
Today in the United States, many states are banning the teaching of critical race theory in schools as presumably divisive, and many universities are ending their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, supposedly to conform with the 2023 US Supreme Court ruling against the use of race as a criterion for diversity in admissions. Against that backdrop, this volume is an important reminder of the value of sociological knowledge to understand and even break down racist, sexist, and imperialist exclusions in society. Read the review of Moving from the Margins: Life Histories on Transforming the Study of Racism.
A Champion for the People: A New Biography of Shirley Chisholm Charts Her Pathbreaking Life
Curwood (Univ. of Kentucky) has written a new biography of Shirley Chisholm, a towering figure in American politics from the 1960s through the 1980s, which doubles as a primer on the American political system, covering the good, the bad, and the ugly. Read the review of Shirley Chisholm: Champion of Black Feminist Power Politics.
TIE Podcast
TIE Podcast interviews thought leaders from across academia and the professional community to explore a range of topics to address DEIA through a pedagogical, scholarly, curatorial, and workplace/professional lens. The TIE Podcast is part of the Toward Inclusive Excellence content vertical. These episodes include discussions on environmental justice and investigating the “hard histories” of universities.
Camille Dungy on Environmental Justice and the Making of Soil
Camille T. Dungy, University Distinguished Professor of English at Colorado State University discusses her latest book, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden. An author of prose and poetry, Camille explains how she planned for the title to be a collection of nature poems, but while writing—crucially, in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic—she was instead inspired by her ongoing project to transform her yard into a space with diverse, native plants. Recounting the seven-year journey of her garden, Camille interweaves key environmental justice texts and nature writing to underscore the importance of diversifying both our gardens and environmental literature. Listen to the episode with Camille.
Dr. Martha S. Jones on Hard Histories at Hopkins and Committing to Knowledge
Dr. Martha S. Jones, Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, returns to the podcast to discuss her research project Hard Histories at Hopkins, which investigates the history of racism, discrimination, and slavery at Johns Hopkins University and its impact on the institution and communities in Baltimore. Martha chats about the development and genesis of the project, outlining its aim to “lift the hood” of the scholarly process with a webinar series and weekly posts on Substack. In addition, Martha follows up on the banning of her book, Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All. Listen to the episode with Martha.
Review of the Week
Each week Choice highlights a review that addresses a topical issue, event, or holiday—or simply, a review we believe deserves more attention. These picks discuss feminist animal studies, resistance in South Asian women’s fiction, and more.
Outstanding Academic Titles
Outstanding Academic Titles is Choice’s premier editorial franchise of the best titles of the year. Published each December, the list is separated into unique categories and previewed for collection development purposes or personal reading pleasure. These selections pertain to women’s history.
Outstanding Academic Titles 2024: Women’s History
