Teresa Helena Moreno wins the 2024 Annual Library Juice Paper Contest
Library Juice Press is excited to announce the winner of the 2024 Annual Library Juice Paper Contest. Teresa Helena Moreno’s paper, titled, “Interrupting the Criminalization of Information in the Academic Library Classroom,” published in the Canadian Journal of Academic Librarianship, was determined by the award jury to be the most excellent paper at meeting the criteria for the award out of seventeen submissions. The award jury consisted of three information professionals. The jury wrote,
“This paper articulates and crystallizes an incredibly creative and generative framework through which to think about censorship and surveillance in libraries. Capturing the long historic arc of a complex history, Moreno describes the myriad ways information and access to it has been criminalized by those that have sought to control and erase Black thought, history, and knowledge traditions. Moreno then turns to Abolition Pedagogy’s as a method of refusal and its liberatory potential to reject the prison-industrial complex, white supremacy, militarization, and colonialism. The judges agreed that Moreno’s work demonstrated critical scholarship at its best, but that the paper’s final turn to Black Love and Black Joy as sites of resistance, sustentation, and creation provided a work that was as hopeful as it was galvanizing.”
Moreno is a librarian at the University of Illinois Chicago.
In addition, the jury also selected two papers for honorable mention awards:
Nancy Kranich’s “Civic Literacy: Reimagining a Role for Libraries,” in Library Quarterly
John LaDue’s “Information Literacy: Moving beyond critical to revolutionary,” in the Journal for Critical Education Policy Studies (JCEPS
The jury wrote, “All three finalists authored incredibly strong papers, and we highly recommend each. We note that the common thread through each is a focus on pedagogical questions of how libraries may move forward, emphasizing solidarity between librarians, civic educators and other stakeholders of democracy.”
All papers were carefully read and judged using the following criteria:
- Clarity of writing
- Originality of thought
- Sincerity of effort at reaching something true
- Soundness of argumentation (where applicable)
- Relevance to our time and situation
The Library Juice Paper Contest winner receives an award of $1000. The intention of this contest is to encourage and reward good work in the field of library and information studies, humanistically understood, through a monetary award and public recognition. Papers submitted may be pending publication, or published (formally or informally) in the year of the award. Any type of paper may be entered as long as it is not a report of an empirical study. Examples of accepted forms would be literature review essays, analytical essays, historical research, and personal essays. The work may include some informal primary research, but may not essentially be the report of an empirical study.
Library Juice Press is an imprint of Litwin Books, LLC specializing in theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective, for an audience of professional librarians and students of library science.