CFP: CAPAL17: Foundations & Futures: Critical Reflections on the Pasts, Presents, and Possibilities of Academic Librarianship
CFP: Call for Proposals
CAPAL17: Foundations & Futures: Critical Reflections on the Pasts, Presents, and Possibilities of Academic Librarianship
CAPAL/ACBAP Annual Meeting – May 30 – June 1, 2017
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2017
Ryerson University
Toronto, Ontario
The Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL) invites you to participate in its annual conference, to be held as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2017 in Toronto, Ontario, which lies in the territory of the Haudenosaunee and the Mississaugas of the New Credit River. This conference offers librarians and allied professionals across all disciplines an alternative space to share research and scholarship, challenge current thinking about professional issues, and forge new relationships.
Theme
In keeping with the Congress 2017 theme, From Far and Wide: The Next 150, our focus is CAPAL17: Foundations & Futures: Critical Reflections on the Pasts, Presents, and Possibilities of Academic Librarianship.
This conference provides an opportunity for the academic library community to critically examine and discuss together the ways in which our profession is influenced by its social, political, and economic environments. By considering academic librarianship within its historical contexts, its presents, and its possible futures, and by situating it within evolving cultural frameworks and structures of power, we can better understand the ways in which academic librarianship may reflect, reinforce, or challenge these contexts both positively and negatively.
How can “recalling, retelling, and scrutinizing” our stories help us to understand the present and envision the future of academic librarianship? What are the logics and practices that constitute and reconstitute our profession, and inform our assumptions and approaches?
This conference engages with current discussions surrounding what many consider to be a significant juncture in academic librarianship: the turn towards critically examining the contexts and roots of our profession. How for instance, do we as a profession integrate understanding of the pasts and presents of broader social contexts and engage meaningfully in these necessary conversations?
Potential Topics:
Papers presented might relate to aspects of the following themes (though they need not be limited to them):
– Critical reflections on librarian identity, agency, and representation (in areas such as gender, sexuality, race, decolonization/indigenization, professionalism, stereotypes)
– Critical reflections on core values: intellectual and academic freedom, access to information, privacy of information, preservation and curation, professionalism, etc.
– Bringing the oppositional practices of broader social mobilization around movements (e.g., Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, transgender rights, and others) to bear on our work
– Critical librarianship in practice: collections development and management, information literacy, reference services, and other areas of service (e.g., cultural bias in knowledge organization; absent histories, etc.)
– Critical reflections on career paths (e.g., early-career professionals, new and emerging roles, specializations, management, leadership, etc.)
– Unpacking of language, rhetoric, and discourse that influence and constitute our profession and services (e.g., buzzwords, military or business speak, oppositional discourses of past/future, print/digital, progressive/obsolete, etc.)
– Modes of knowledge creation, research dissemination, and engagement (e.g., oral traditions, co-creation, copyright, open access, and other forms of scholarly communication, etc.)
– Critical review of current educational requirements and training for academic librarians
The Program Committee invites proposals for individual papers as well as proposals for panel submissions of three papers. Proposed papers must be original and not have been published elsewhere.
Individual papers are typically 20 minutes in length. For individual papers, please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words and a presentation title, with a brief biographical statement and your contact information.
For complete panels, please submit a panel abstract of no more than 400 words as well as a list of all participants and brief biographical statements, and a separate abstract of no more than 400 words for each presenter. Please identify and provide participants’ contact information for the panel organizer.
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 conventions: Lastname_Keywordoftopic.docx
Proposals and questions should be directed to the Program Chair, Courtney Waugh at cwaugh5@uwo.ca
Deadline for Proposals is: the 23rd of December, 2016
Further information about the conference, as well as Congress 2017 more broadly, will be available soon.