2022 CCLI Keynote Speaker: Jennifer Brown
In librarianship, we’re quite good at telling stories. In fact, those stories often feel speculative. As a profession, we invent false narratives about racial justice, anti-oppression, and institutional progress–all the time. We tell those stories in the past tense; fables, already finished. We omit truths too gnarled to glimpse; exorcise underrepresented, underpaid, and underprivileged library workers who paved any part of that progress, shearing them like cartilage from bone. Library instruction–whether framed critically, or not–isn’t immune from this.
This keynote will disrupt those tales, weaving speculative and creative thought from Black, Indigenous, and writers/scholars of Color, across our intersectional embodiments, to breathe new possibilities into being. It will ask where academic libraries–and library instruction–might be, if we acknowledged our supposed past as present, and speculated progress as the ongoing work of dismantling supremacy within libraries.
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Speculative Pedagogies for Liberation
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Jennifer Brown is an Undergraduate Learning & Research Librarian at UC Berkeley and an Ignyte Award nominated Science Fiction & Fantasy author. Critical pedagogies guide her instruction, reference, and advocacy work, which includes serving as one of the Community Managers for We Here, an organization that provides supportive communities for Black and Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in LIS. There, she supports BIPOC library & archives workers, stewards impactful community projects, like We Reads, and serves on the advisory board for up//root: a we here publication.
Jennifer holds a Master of Science in Information from the University of Michigan, and a Bachelor of Arts in Media Studies from UC Berkeley. Her published research examines academic labor inequity using Critical Race Theory, institutional diversity work through the lens of white, hegemonic performance culture, and critical race pedagogies within library instruction. Meanwhile, her flash fiction, short stories, and novelette center Black, queer characters wielding power amid fantastic otherworlds. Her work has been published in FIYAH Literary Magazine, Tor.com, Podcastle, Anathema Magazine, Baffling Magazine, and was recently translated for an issue of Crononauta Magazine’s Matreon publication.