Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Textbook Affordability Is A Social Justice Issue: How Open Textbooks Are Paving The Way To Equality In Higher Education, Sarah Appedu

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Textbook affordability is becoming a bigger and bigger problem for students. Access to textbooks is essential for students to be able to meet their learning needs and have equal opportunity to excel as their peers. Open Textbooks are one response to this issue, but while most library outreach is focused on faculty members, students are an underutilized voice in the open education conversation. This presentation aims to educate students on what open textbooks are, what their limitations are, and how all students can participate in advocating for more affordable course materials.

Open Access, Social Justice, And The Moral Imperative: Why Oa Publishing Matters To Wgs, Sarah P. Appedu

All Musselman Library Staff Works

Students in the discipline of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies are uniquely positioned to critically engage with systems of power and apply academic theory to real world practice as a field that has a clear and implicit social justice angle to its scholarship. The Open Access movement can benefit from the critical theories used in WGS as a means of ensuring maximum inclusivity of the movement. Further, WGS students must acknowledge their privileged position within an academic institution and publish in ways that undermine the systems of power that lock up knowledge behind a toll in order to align their …

Queering The Library Of Congress, Carlos R. Fernandez

Works of the FIU Libraries

This poster will attempt to apply the techniques used in Queer Theory to explore library and information science’s use and misuse of library classification systems; and to examine how “queering” these philosophical categories can not only improve libraries, but also help change social constructs.

For millennia, philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, have used and expounded upon categories and systems of classification. Their purpose is to make research and the retrieval of information easier. Unfortunately, the rules used to categorize and catalog make information retrieval more challenging for some, due to social constructs such as heteronormality.

The importance of this …