Call for Proposals

CAPAL16: BEYOND THE LIBRARY: AGENCY, PRACTICE, AND SOCIETY

CAPAL/ACBAP Annual Conference – May 28–June 3, 2016

Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2016

University of Calgary

Calgary, Alberta

The Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL) invites participation in its annual conference, to be held as part of Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2016 at the University of Calgary, Calgary, Alberta, Canada (http://congress2016.ca/). The conference offers opportunity to share critical research and scholarship, challenge current thinking, and forge new relationships across all disciplines.

THEME

In keeping with the Congress 2016 theme, Energizing Communities, CAPAL16 seeks to look “Beyond the Library” to rethink how academic librarians engage with their communities within which our institutions are situated or those with whom we share disciplinary concerns or approaches. Such communities may be physical, epistemic, academic, or imagined communities, communities of identity, or those communities around us and to which we contribute.

What can the discipline of library and information studies (LIS) learn from other disciplines?  What might LIS as an interdisciplinary field look like?  Where and how should academic librarianship be situated within and in relation to other communities?

RATIONALE

Like any institution, academic libraries both reflect and help shape the societies of which they are part. It is therefore critical for academic librarians to consider how they and their work are situated – professionally, ontologically, ethically, epistemologically, and physically. As social agents, we share and occupy socio-economic, political, and technological spaces in our efforts to provide diverse, high quality, informational resources and critical education within a contemporary (i.e., neoliberal) legal and economic framework.

In such an environment, effecting change requires seeking out, examining, and engaging with new ideas, approaches, theories, communities, understandings, and ways of knowing, which, themselves, may fall outside the traditional boundaries of the discipline of library and information studies. We need to move our lines of inquiry “beyond the library”–physically and intellectually–into new arenas and new communities. This conference is an invitation to academic librarians and scholars who study libraries and information to discuss how we can reframe academic librarianship: in practice, in policy, in theory, and in society.

Potential topic areas include but are not limited to:

·         Academic librarianship in the context of urgent socio-political priorities, such as climate change, environmental sustainability, and social equity;
·         The relationship between academic librarianship and democracy;
·         Academic librarianship and reconciliation with Indigenous peoples;
·         Indigenizing, decolonizing, diversity, and inclusion in academic librarianship;
·         The philosophical bases of academic librarianship in social theory;
·         The history of academic librarianship and the role of academic librarians in the academy;
·         The potentially biased treatment of controversial issues and scholarly debates in knowledge organization and information retrieval systems;
·         The sociology of knowledge mobilization;
·         Academic librarianship and its relationship to the design of user spaces;
·         Academic librarianship’s response to privacy and security in the “post-Snowden” era;
·         Community development, “town-gown” relationships, and academic librarianship;
·         Core values of academic librarianship in mediated spaces;
·         Critical theory, interdisciplinary approaches and subject expertise in LIS education for academic librarians.

SUBMISSION INFORMATION

The Program Committee invites proposals for individual papers as well as proposals for panel submissions of three papers. Individual papers are typically 20 minutes in length. For individual papers, please submit an abstract of 300 words and a presentation title, with brief biographical statement and your contact information. For complete panels, please submit a panel abstract of 300 words as well as a list of all participants and brief biographical statements, and a separate abstract of 300 words for each presenter. Please identify and provide participants’ contact information for the panel organizer. International proposals and proposals from non-members and students are welcome.

Please feel free to contact the Program Committee to discuss a topic for a paper, panel, or other session format. Proposals should be emailed as an attachment as a doc. or docx. file, using the following filename format:

Lastname_Keywordoftopic.docx

Proposals and questions should be directed to the Program Chairs:

Michael Dudley:         m.dudley@uwinnipeg.ca

John Wright:               jpwright@ucalgary.ca

Deadline for proposals: January 4^th, 2016.

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