Taking a knowledge justice approach to designing equitable, accessible, and inclusive MLIS curriculum and pedagogy

Presented by Emily Carrasco-Acosta, Michelle Liu, Kaha Liban, Isabella Moyer, Miyang Roh, Emma Schindler-Wood, Heather Campbell and Pam McKenzie as part of the FIMS Seminar Series 2025/26.

Attend in person: FNB 4110
Attend online: Zoom link

Abstract: Working librarians and LIS educators are increasingly attending to the ways that professional and educational practices overlook, ignore, and silence the lived experiences of library users and MLIS students belonging to groups that face systemic marginalization. Our research group (six MLIS students, a Teaching and Learning Librarian from Western Libraries, and a FIMS faculty member) will report emerging findings and recommendations from our Fall 2025 pedagogical partnership. We will share three ways that we have worked toward centering lived experience:

• Engaging in a faculty/librarian/student partnership that seeks to redistribute power and decision-making
• Conducting collaborative autoethnographic research
• Applying a knowledge justice framework to reflect on our own positionality and to learn from perspectives that are different to our own

The faculty and librarian partners will provide an overview of our goals for the partnership, and the student partners will present some of the themes and perspectives they have been researching.