Over this academic year, our Simmons SLIS Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee has been working collaboratively with input from faculty, students, and staff to develop a new course for our graduate curriculum that addresses many of the challenges that have been identified by scholars and practitioners of color in our field. For example, in their (2018) paper “A Holistic Approach for Inclusive Librarianship: Decentering Whiteness in Our Profession,” Isabel Espinal, Tonia Sutherland, and Charlotte Roh outline the current scholarship on whiteness in LIS, which highlights the harms to librarians of color that include racial “microagressions” and other negative impacts that result from whiteness, white privilege, and systemic white supremacy that have and continue to shape public libraries in the U.S. today.
In response, our DEI Committee, with support from our graduate students, introduced a new course for our graduate curriculum which we have titled “Decentering Whiteness in LIS.” I am proud to announce the course proposal received overwhelming support from our SLIS faculty and will join our graduate curriculum. Continue Reading
