Applied Social Justice PHD

One of the very few Black women's studies books is entitled All the Women Are White; All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us are Brave.1 I have chosen this title as a point of departure in my efforts to develop a Black feminist criticism 2 because it sets forth a problematic consequence of the tendency to treat race and gender as mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis. In this talk, I want to examine how this tendency is perpetuated by a single-axis framework that is dominant in antidiscrimination law and that is also reflected in feminist theory and antiracist politics.

This piece examines the parallels between one-shot library instruction and one-off equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) workshops. Library and Information Science/ Studies (LIS) as a field problematically frames both information literacy and EDI as add-ons or afterthoughts to the work of library and information workers. This framing tells on itself when the field/profession turns to one-shots, one-off EDI workshops, or other band aid solutions to larger systemic and structural issues. Without actually “solving” anything, these types of neoliberal solutions become part of what enables and extends white supremacy’s hold on LIS (Hudson, 2017; Leung & López-McKnight, 2021). What are we hoping to accomplish with the one-shot? What are we hoping to accomplish toward and with information literacy and EDI? In other words, what’s the point of information literacy and EDI?

Scholars and practitioners have exposed the limitations of traditional Euro-American approaches to knowledge organization (KO) when it comes to Indigenous topics. To develop more effective KO practices, there is a need for KO practitioners to understand Indigenous perspectives at an epistemological level. A theoretically informed model of Indigenous systems of knowledge serves as a pedagogical tool to support the labor of boundary spanning and code-switching between Euro-American KO practices and Indigenous KO practices.

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.