Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Minimizing Harm While Maximizing Engagement: Using Identity Affinity Groups To Engage With Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Topics In Lis Courses, Sarah De La Rosa, Aaron Elkins, Tulip Majumdar, Vikki Orepitan, Rachel Simons, Andrew Vierkant

New Librarianship Symposia Series: Fall 2021

While diversity in the LIS field has made some progress during the last two decades (Kung et al., 2020), the whiteness of the discipline remains a problem (Brown et al., 2018) for patrons and practitioners. One way to address LIS’s whiteness problem is to better prepare pre-service librarians to effectively and respectfully engage with diverse communities (Jaeger et al., 2013) and LIS professionals of color (Mehra, 2020). However, the field still has progress to make in how it discusses diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) issues within LIS curricula (Pawley, 2006). Centering DEIJ topics with a humble and self-critical approach …