Library Policies and Marginalized Communities

Aug. 2018

Library Policies and Marginalized Communities

Jeanie Austin, a teen services librarian with San Francisco Public Library, will present their dissertation research which traces how past policies and processes that established white, middle-class, and hetero-normative conduct and knowledge as central to library services have worked—and continue to work—against youth of color and/or LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth. It pulls from queer, feminist, poststructural, and critical theory to provide a model for how libraries can center youth made vulnerable to the state. This involves an interrogation of what representation does or can do in the current moment alongside the recognition that cultures within librarianship inhibit library access for youth of color and/or LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth.