Please join us virtually on Wednesday, January 31 from 3:00-4:00 PM Eastern for The Critical Race Theory collective: Community Matters! A virtual panel discussion sponsored by The Ohio State University Libraries IDEAS Committee and the Association for Library and Information Science Education’s (ALISE) Innovative Pedagogies Special Interest Group.
To register for this event, please click here. (Note: You will receive the Zoom information for the panel after you complete the registration form.)
In 2020 we experienced the heat of a summer of global racial justice, which quickly cooled into the retrenchments of injustice traditions. This racial justice regression reached a critical pivot point on September 22, 2020 when the 45th president of the United States issued Executive Order 13950 deeming unAmerican and prohibiting diversity training within the US purview of the federal government. Within the 45th president’s push back against diversity, inclusion and equity efforts was the targeting of critical race theory (CRT) by name.
Fast forward to 2021…
The Critical Race Theory collective (CRTc) began forming in early spring of 2021 as simply an editorial team that has evolved to now exist as a community of international, interdisciplinary, and intersectional scholar-activists who are committed to cultivating knowledge and information across borders. In turn, they ground their work in the tenets and tools of CRT. The collective’s editorial work includes a Critical Race Theory Special Issue for the international peer-reviewed journal Education for Information (EFI), released in December 2022 (38:4). The CRTc currently has a Call for Papers for a second special issue in EFI: Resistant Knowledges: unmasking coloniality through the re-search of local to global communities. The Resistant Knowledges call is grounded in Derrick Bell’s (classic) CRT premise of Racial Realism (1992, p.373-74).
Beyond their scholarly work, the CRTc also has a suite of media content consisting of a Blog The Bell Ringer, their podcast The Organic Intellectuals (TOI), a YouTube Channel – CRTc Tv, and a publicly shared CRTc Zotero library.
In this one hour presentation, members of the CRTc’s regional communities discuss why they joined the collective, the importance of the CRTc’s work, and upcoming plans to implement additional infrastructure and content using an Entrepreneurial Spirit and Community Building approach.
The CRTc Panel:
Stephanie Birch (she/hes) – Editorial Associate, is the Africana Studies Librarian at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, Connecticut. She earned her MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2016, with a joint MA in African Studies. She also earned a MA in History and a BFA in Art History, concentrating in African and Diaspora Art. Her research interests include community-based engagement and research; learner-centered library instruction, outreach, and engagement; and Black digital humanities. Stephanie also serves as the managing editor for the CRTc’s Blog, The Bell Ringer.
Jon Cawthorne, PhD (he/him) Organizational Leadership and Board Development, is a Librarian IV at Wayne State University Library System in Detroit, Michigan. Between August 2017 and June 2022, he served as Dean of the Wayne State University (five) libraries. Cawthorne also leads the ALA-accredited Wayne State School of Information Sciences. He has also served as ACRL president, focusing on issues around organizational development; equity, diversity and inclusion; and the future of academic libraries. Cawthorne’s published research bridges the realms of diversity, libraries, organizational culture and leadership with a shared focus on models that anticipate and plan for rapid change and the future through strategic capacity building and workforce development.
Vanessa (Chacha) Centento (she/her) – Editorial Associate, is a librarian in Northern California, where she has worked in public libraries for fifteen years. Her recent work has focused on youth services, management, and equity, diversity, and inclusion in public libraries. She is a Racial Healing Circle Practitioner, and a speaker with the American Library Association’s EDI Speaker’s Bureau. In 2018, she worked as a Librarian Advisor for the Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Great Stories Club Deeper Than Our Skins: The Present is a Conversation with the Past project. Her story touches on removal and return to culture, intergenerational trauma, generational gang cultures, identity and healing.
Anthony W. Dunbar (Tony), PhD (he/him) – Community Initiator and International Community Lead – is an Associate Professor at Dominican University (DU) in the School of Information Studies and an Adjunct Sociology Professor at Lewis University. He also serves as a co convener for the Association of Library and Information Science’s (ALISE) Innovative Pedagogy Special Interest Group. Tony’s research builds on the racial and social justice frameworks of Critical Race Theory (CRT). His current efforts focus on developing curriculum, scholarship, and activism (praxis) to expand the CRT framework into a platform specific for Information Studies: Critical Race information Theory (CRiT). He also serves as the host for The Organic Intellectuals podcast.
Natasha Howard (she/her) – (Editorial Associate), is Head of Knowledge & Library Services & Global Majority Network (GMN) Strategic Ambassador at NELFT NHS Trust. Prior to NELFT she worked for a start-up in the City and at a healthcare charity; she has over 20 years of experience in the library and information sector and was joint winner of the CILIP K&IM and UKeIG Information Manager of the Year Award 2020. Natasha is passionate about health inequalities and health and digital literacy. Natasha is a trustee of Success For All Educational Trust (SFAET), a multi academy school trust. In her spare time she enjoys running (slowly) and can often be found participating and volunteering at local parkrun.
Ramona Naicker (she/her) – Editorial Associate and Regional Lead (Australia), is Scholarly Services Librarian Deakin University and a former Medical Librarian at Monash University, Australia, with a background as an Information Specialist for the UK National Health Service, as well as the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Healthcare Libraries. Passionate about combating racial bias in medical research, Ramona has delivered talks at institutions and conferences internationally, including NIHR, CALC, and ALIA, and authored papers on this topic. Ramona’s tool for critically appraising antiracism has been shared and utilized by various institutions, including the University of Cambridge. She is a lead author of Health Education England’s health equity eLearning module, and collaborated with Cardiff University to develop a program aimed at fostering antiracist practices among undergraduate medical students.