Instructor: Emily Drabinski
Location: Los Angeles / UCLA
Mode: In-person
Dates: August 4–8, 2025
Tuition: $1200.00

Description

Critical librarianship interrogates library practices to understand how the field’s systems and structures emerge through ideologies of gender, race, class, and other axes of social difference. For example, critical librarians take the cataloging and classification systems that are often pitched as neutral and natural and ask why books related to minoritized sexualities are described incompletely and shelved as “social problems.” If we can understand how library work is constituted through complex relations of power, we can begin to build a different kind of librarianship that works toward a more just future. Participants will work together to build a shared analysis of power and the terrain of struggle along with concrete plans for taking action in their own libraries.

Requirements

Offered

2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 by Emily Drabinski

Credit

Completion of this course helps to meet requirements for one of the following certificate requirements:

• 1 of 2 elective credit courses for Certificate in Rare Books and Manuscripts, or
• the Critical Librarianship in Praxis requirement for Certificate in Librarianship, Activism, and Justice