Karen Nicholson Wins Seventh Annual Library Juice Paper Contest

PRESS RELEASE
October 3, 2018
Sacramento, CA

Library Juice Press is happy to announce the winner of the Seventh Annual Library Juice Paper Contest. Karen Nicholson’s paper, titled, “On the Space/Time of Information Literacy, Higher Education, and the Global Knowledge Economy,” published in the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, was judged by the award jury to be the best paper out of fifty submitted in this year’s contest. The award jury said about her paper:

“‘On the Space/Time of Information Literacy, Higher Education, and the Global Knowledge Economy’ is a work of significant substance and highlights the best of Critical LIS scholarship. Drawing from critical geography’s insight that space and time are socially produced, Nicholson situates the processes and practices of information literacy within the social, political, and economic environments of the global knowledge economy. With clear writing and originality of thought, the essay deftly details how sociomaterial practices of university libraries produce and regulate the subjectivities of library workers and their students.”

Karen P. Nicholson, Ph.D., is Manager, Information Literacy, at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada.

The jury chose to recognize another paper with an honorable mention. The honorable mention goes to Rafia Mirza and Maura Seale, for their paper, “Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom,” published in the Journal of Radical Librarianship. The jury wrote about this paper:

“‘Speech and Silence: Race, Neoliberalism, and Intellectual Freedom’ does something significant and different, connecting the metaphor of the library as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ to issues of white supremacy, racial capitalism, and public library practice. This essay’s insights on how racial and economic ideologies within librarianship influence public space policies hold profound relevance to our time and situation, particularly the OIF’s 2018 revision of ‘Meeting Rooms: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights’ to include hate groups and ALA Council’s decision to rescind these revisions. Mirza and Seale situate library practices and policies within the broader historical and material context of racial capitalism.”

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.

The criteria for judgment are:

– Clarity of writing
– Originality of thought
– Sincerity of effort at reaching something true
– Soundness of argumentation (where applicable)
– Relevance to our time and situation

Entries in next year’s award are due August 1st, 2020.

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.

Media contact:
Rory Litwin
916-905-0291
rory@libraryjuicepress.com
PO Box 188784, Sacramento, CA 95818

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