(Radical) Keywords : A Conversation

Monday October 17th at 6.30 the Graduate Center Library will host a combined special interest group for Reference and Social Justice. Join researchers, students, authors, and librarians as we unpack language, text, or keywords with an eye to their meaning in research and librarianship.14589810_10154559827234889_9185706527498308188_o
AGENCY: AK Thompson in conversation with April Hathcock
AUTHORITY: Maia Ramnath in conversation with Hasina Islam
RACE: Conor Tomás Reed in conversation with Myron Brown
Our speakers are librarians, academics, writers, and activists.
Join us!

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AK Thompson got kicked out of high school for publishing an underground newspaper called The Agitator and has been an activist, writer, and social theorist ever since. Currently teaching social theory at Fordham University, his publications include Black Bloc, White Riot: Anti-Globalization and the Genealogy of Dissent (2010) and Sociology for Changing the World: Social Movements/Social Research (2006). Between 2005 and 2012, he served on the Editorial Committee of Upping The Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action.

April Hathcock is the Scholarly Communications Librarian at NYU where she educates the campus community on issues of ownership, access, and rights in the research lifecycle. Her research interests include diversity and inclusion in librarianship, copyright, and cultural creation and exchange.

Maia Ramnath is a writer, activist, historian and performing artist. She is currently at work on her third book, which is on the South Asian Progressive Writers movement. She serves on the board of the Institute for Anarchist Studies and the editorial collective for the IAS journal Perspectives. She is currently teaching history and Asian studies at Penn State University. She loves libraries. And praxis.

Hasina Islam is a children’s librarian for Brooklyn Public Library.

Conor Tomás Reed is an archivist, doctoral student, educator, and organizer at the City University of New York, a collective member of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and a co-founding participant in the Free University of New York City. Conor researches twentieth and twenty first-century literatures of social movements and urban freedom schools, and is a 2016-2017 Scholar-in-Residence at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Myron Brown is a 2010 graduate of the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He gained valuable experience as a reference librarian at professional schools where he honed the skills important to reference librarians including customer service and research. Myron has been working as a General Librarian at Queens Library since March 2016.

Via METRO:
AK Press published Keywords for Radicals: The Contested Vocabulary of Late-Capitalist Struggle, exploring some of the language that shapes & informs our political & socioeconomic landscape. We have invited the authors of Keywords entries & librarians to engage in conversation on select keywords and to consider how they apply to reference service specifically, but also to librarianship, research, collaborative teaching & social justice within the library more generally. Join this participatory community dialogue as we investigate how radical keywords shape our work and our teaching. Open to librarians, students, educators, archivists, activists, and wider publics.

A collaboration of METRO’s Reference & Social Justice Special Interest Groups.

Monday, October 17th, 2016
6:30pm – 8:00pm
The Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
New York, NY 10016
Room C198

Register via METRO: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/radical-keywords-for-reference-librarianship-a-social-justice-sig-reference-sig-event-tickets-28332311707.

About the Author

Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is an Assistant Professor and Head of Reference at the Graduate Center Library.