Recommended Readings for Critical Librarianship

Within librarianship, I mostly do instruction, outreach, and reference. As these are my most local and constant contexts, these practices inflect how I think of librarianship. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that most of these articles have to do with those things—but this connection certainly doesn’t mean that I think critical librarianship only exists within these contexts!

I’ll link to things beyond these contexts as well, when I read ones that excite me. Of course, I’d love for you to write a list like this that focuses on your own approaches to librarianship.

Critical Pedagogy & Critical Information Literacy

Books

• Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, bell hooks, 1994

• On Critical Pedagogy, Henry Giroux, 2011

• Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction, Maria T. Accardi, 2013

• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, 2015 (30^th anniversary edition)

Articles

• “Librarians as Disciplinary Discourse Mediators: Using Genre Theory to Move Toward Critical Information Literacy”, Michelle H. Simmons, 2005, portal: Libraries and the Academy

• “Redefining Sources as Social Acts: Genre Theory in Information Literacy Instruction”, Joel M. Burkholder, 2010, Library Philosophy and Practice

• “A Decade of Critical Information Literacy: A Review of the Literature”, Eamon Tewell, 2015, Communications in Information Literacy

• “Information Literacy: a Review and Poststructural Critique”, Cushla Kapitzke, 2003, Australian Journal of Language and Literacy

• “(In)formation literacy: A positivist epistemology and a politics of (out)formation”, Cushla Kapitzke, 2003, Educational Theory

Critical Librarianship Blog Posts & Blogs

Kudos

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