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Communications in Information Literacy

Neoliberalism

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Working Conditions Are Learning Conditions: Understanding Information Literacy Instruction Through Neoliberal Capitalism, Romel Espinel, Eamon Tewell Dec 2023

Working Conditions Are Learning Conditions: Understanding Information Literacy Instruction Through Neoliberal Capitalism, Romel Espinel, Eamon Tewell

Communications in Information Literacy

Neoliberal capitalism’s demands for efficiency and innovation have greatly impacted North American academic libraries and the work conducted in them, including information literacy instruction. The divisive forces of neoliberalism must be met with resistance, and libraries hold the potential for generating an information literacy praxis where learners engage information with a critical consciousness instead of a consumerist one. Using library labor conditions and the contradictions between innovation and student learning as focal points, we argue that academic library workers should seek to center attention to inequities and injustices in the information economy and scholarly information systems in their instruction, identify …


Rethinking The Neoliberal University: Critical Library Pedagogy In An Age Of Transition, Jason Coleman, Lis Pankl Jun 2020

Rethinking The Neoliberal University: Critical Library Pedagogy In An Age Of Transition, Jason Coleman, Lis Pankl

Communications in Information Literacy

In the chapter we wrote 10 years ago for Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods we asked instructors to free themselves from the stifling heritage of positivism that privileged tools and instrumentality above meaning. Drawing on Henry Giroux and Oscar Wilde, we urged our peers to embrace dialogue that respects the individual and draws connections between information literacy and the students’ authentic goals and experiences. In this essay we describe numerous changes over that past decade that embrace the central themes of our chapter. We then explain that these examples coexist within a vast edifice of antithetical, neoliberal institutions. We …