When Leadership Falls Short: The Crisis of Care in Library Work
Posted on in Blog Posts
Top TIE Posts from 2024!
Part Two
Posted on December 22, 2024 in Blog Posts
Continuing our look back over the past year, this highlight compiles the second half of our top posts from 2024. The resource lists, blog posts, and content round-ups included here cover AI, culturally responsive teaching, voting rights, racism, and more. We hope these pieces offer inspiring insights to address challenges facing the library sphere with refreshed motivation in the New Year.
Content Round-ups
Commemorating National Native American Heritage Month with TIE and Choice Content (Nov. 5, 2024)
Commemorating Native American Heritage Month
In honor of National Native American Heritage Month, the Toward Inclusive Excellence team assembled TIE and Choice resources that foreground the histories and experiences of Native Americans. 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. Read the full round-up.
Blog Posts
Upgrading AI Dialogue: Prioritizing Women of Color Researchers (Oct. 22, 2024)
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 full blog post.
Culturally Responsive Practices and Illuminating The Magnitude of Us (Oct. 30, 2024)
This blog post aims to provide some ideas for ways educators, leaders, and librarians can evaluate, assess, and create opportunities for inclusive teaching and learning. The un/HUSH framework, discussed below, is intended to be an interdisciplinary, flexible blueprint for a multitude of subjects and age groups. It can help those who follow it better evaluate texts and evaluate or build curricula. Read the full blog post.
Resource Lists
Resources on Women’s Advancement in the Workplace (March 13, 2024)
To continue the commemoration of Women’s History Month, this week Toward Inclusive Excellence offers a resource list for understanding women’s advancement in the workplace. The suggested resources not only highlight skills and historical events that have been critical to women advancing in the workplace, but barriers to women’s advancement as well, spanning social class, race, sexuality, ability, and even broader economic issues that impact the workforce at large. At a time when women’s rights and DEIA efforts are regularly under threat, these resources are especially crucial. Read the full list of resources.
Resources on Racism and Sexism in College Sports (April 8, 2024)
College sports are always a hot topic in the United States. Whether Americans are partaking in March Madness or considering if student athletes should be paid, college sports loom large in American public discourse. The subject is rife with both incredible feats and unfortunate legacies. This year, to mark National Student-Athlete Day, the TIE team has pulled together a short primer of resources that chart the painful legacies of racism and sexism in college sports, as well as efforts to break down these barriers. Read the full list of resources.
DEIA Resources on Voting Rights: Fall 2024 Update (Sept. 11, 2024)
In 2022, TIE published the first iteration of our resource list on voting rights. Ahead of the 2024 election, we asked some of our former contributors for newer titles that they might recommend to readers looking to learn more or librarians seeking to curate collections for students and faculty. The following short update includes titles primarily published since 2022, as well as a few previously published volumes that still offer helpful insights. Read the full list of resources.
Thank you to everyone who contributed to TIE over the past year!
Krista Aronson
Dr. Krista Aronson (she/her) is an Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of Psychology at Bates College. Her scholarship focuses on illuminating how people come to understand complex social constructs like race and ethnicity, including how children process and understand race as well as appropriate, effective and productive ways to discuss this topic with them; specifically, the effective use of picture books to enhance intercultural relationships and self-understanding during childhood. Her own identity as a biracial woman deeply informs her work. The Diverse BookFinder and associated work are the focus of her active research, which represents a substantial portion of the professional effort of faculty at Bates.
Sam Berry Sullivan
Sam Berry-Sullivan is a white, nonbinary, neurodivergent academic librarian who leverages their privilege and unique experience of the world to advocate for diversity and equity in librarianship, higher education, and health sciences, for which Sam is subject liaison.
Marlee Bunch
Dr. Marlee Bunch is an interdisciplinary educator, author, researcher, and lifelong learner. Her research examines the oral histories of Black female educators in Hattiesburg, Mississippi who taught between 1954-1971.
She received her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois in 2022 in Education/Policy/Organizational Leadership. Additionally, she has a Masters in Education (MEd), a Masters in Gifted Education (MS), a Bachelors in English, a certification in Diversity/Equity/Inclusion, and a certification in ESL (English as a Second Language).
Bunch has been an educator for 17+ years and is the founder of the un/Hush teaching framework. You can reach out or learn more about her work at https://www.marleebunch.com/.
Ashleigh Coren
Ashleigh Coren is a content strategist, educator, and curator based in the Washington, D.C. area.
Ekow Eshun
Ekow Eshun is a writer and curator. He is Chairman of the Fourth Plinth, overseeing the foremost public art programme in the UK, and the former Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is the curator of exhibitions including, most recently, In the Black Fantastic at the Hayward Gallery, London, for which he was awarded the Curatorial Prize 2023 by the Association for Art History, and author of books including Black Gold of the Sun, shortlisted for the Orwell prize, and Africa State of Mind, nominated for the Lucie Photo Book Prize.
Described by The Guardian as a ‘cultural polymath’, he is the writer and presenter of documentaries including the BBC film Dark Matter: A History of the Afrofuture, and the BBC Radio 4 series White Mischief. He has contributed to books on artists including Mark Bradford, Kehinde Wiley, Chris Ofili, John Akomfrah and Wangechi Mutu and his writing has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Financial Times, The Guardian and The Observer. He is a member of the Advisory Board of Liquid Blackness: Journal of Aesthetics and Black Studies and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from London Metropolitan University.
Elena Guzman
Elena Herminia Guzman is an Afro-Boricua documentary filmmaker, educator, and anthropologist raised in the Bronx with deep roots in the LES. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University and is now an Assistant Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at Indiana University Bloomington. Her previous positions have included a postdoctoral fellowship at Haverford College and a Research Associate fellowship at Harvard University with the Women’s Studies and Religion Program in the Divinity School. She is currently writing her book manuscript tentatively titled, Chimera Geographies: Spiritual Borderlands of the Afro-Caribbean, which focuses on the way Black women and non-binary people throughout the African diaspora use ritual performance in African diaspora religions to forge geographies that counter landscapes of oppression. As an educator, she teaches Black feminism, performance, feminist filmmaking, Black cinema, autoethnography, border/land studies, and visual anthropology.
In addition to her work as a scholar, Elena is also a filmmaker whose work explores the transcendental and spiritual experiences of African diasporic religion and spirituality in addition to its intersections with race, gender, and mental health. Her work as a filmmaker has been supported by PBS, Black Public Media, the Independent Public Media Foundation, and the Scribe Foundation amongst others.
Alexia Hudson-Ward
Alexia Hudson-Ward is Associate Director of Research, Learning, and Strategic Partnerships, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Libraries. Her past roles include: the Azariah Smith Root Director of Libraries for Oberlin College, a Penn State tenured librarian, an award-winning entertainment editor, public radio promotions coordinator, and Coca-Cola Company marketing manager.
Martha S. Jones
I am the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. I am a legal and cultural historian whose research explores how Black people have shaped the story of American democracy and today extends to work on memorial landscapes and family memoir. I also direct the Hard Histories at Hopkins Project which, since 2020, has examined the role of slavery and racism at the Johns Hopkins university and hospital.
My books include Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All (2020), Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), and All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007). I am also a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015) and have written many articles, reviews, and essays.
Crystal Yin Lie
Crystal Yin Lie is an Assistant Professor of Comparative World Literature at California University, Long Beach, where she teaches courses in disability studies, health humanities, literature & medicine, and comics & graphic narratives. Her research interests include contemporary literature and life writing about dementia and the representation of disability in comics. She received her PhD in English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor with a graduate certificate in Science, Technology, & Society. Her work can be found in Graphic Medicine (University of Hawai’i Press), Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and The Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies. She was a co-editor of Sex, Identity, Aesthetics The Work of Tobin Siebers and Disability Studies (University of Michigan Press) and is currently co-editing a volume on Disability and Comics (Palgrave).
Brea McQueen
Brea McQueen is an activist and academic librarian whose work primarily focuses on the intersections of disability and librarianship, and challenging normative ideas of what librarianship should look like.
Ray Pun
Ray Pun (he/him) is the academic and research librarian at the Alder Graduate School of Education, a teacher’s residency program in California.
Jamia Williams
Jamia Williams (she/her) is the Consumer Health Program Specialist with the Network of the National Library of Medicine (NNLM) Training Office. She is also the co-creator and co-host of the podcast LibVoices and the founder of The Diversity Fellow’s blog.
Header image is a detail of This is Harlem by Jacob Lawrence. Courtesy of Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. © 2021 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here. Rights Society (ARS), New York. For more information, click here.