This week Emily Drabinski joins the Graduate Center in the role of Critical Pedagogy Librarian, supporting the GC community, particularly the CUNY School of Labor & Urban Studies (SLU) affiliated with the Graduate Center. She will coordinate GC Library instruction and support grad students in developing critical teaching practice.

Emily Drabinski, photo by Alex Irklievski

Drabinski’s scholarship ranges from teaching research methods, to gender and racial inequality, cataloging and classification, library education, higher education, library service to prisoners, labor practice, and library life.

Her 2013 “Queering the Catalog” argues to “identify and critique the politics of the catalog rather than search for a more perfect system that will never come.” It is a “groundbreaking, nuanced article” now “foundational” in the Library and Information Sciences (LIS) curriculum, said UCLA Professor of Archival Studies Michelle Caswell.

Drabinski’s 2014 “Toward a Kairos of Library Instruction” upended thinking about information literacy learning and assessment. “Emily’s passion for librarianship is the praxis of instruction,” said GC Associate Librarian for Scholarly Communication & Digital Scholarship Jill Cirasella. Drabinski co-edited the 2009 LIS mainstay text Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods. She edits the Library Juice Press Series on Gender and Sexuality in Library and Information Studies. With GC Dissertation Research Librarian Roxanne Shirazi and Aliqae Geraci from Cornell University, Drabinski is co-editing a forthcoming Library Trends issue on the topic “Labor in Academic Libraries.”

Drabinski currently holds office on the American Library Association Council, the governing body of the ALA. Her public service that ranges from the local to the national and international. Drabinski joins a critical (in all senses) GC Library staff who could not be more excited to work with her. Follow her on Twitter @edrabinski and find an interview with her in the GC’s 365 Newsletter, March 2019.

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