Education Information in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: what can librarians do?

The incessant commodification of HE is pressuring the academic library’s role into flux. Librarians don’t know if they are to be managers, curators, counsellors, teachers, technicians, AI engineers, or sales assistants. When we were once disseminators of knowledge, librarians must now diversify their offer. Some of us got angry at this situation, and critical of the system. In reaction to the demands of commodification, ‘Critical Librarianship ‘evolved as a practice that strives to destabilize discourses and authoritarian pedagogies. This progressive movement, however, has become an ‘epistemological structure’ of the profession, an expression to drop into meetings. I have recently argued that the tenet of critical theory which critical librarianship adopted has become divorced from the praxis. The concepts of class, commodification, and economics, are no longer in the conversation, replaced by ‘social purpose’, as a more marketable slogan. By reflecting on the commodification of HE, and the origins of critical theory that arose out of the Frankfurt School, this brief presentation hopes to recover the class consciousness of critical theory. This is vital if we want to educate our students to critically reflect on the contradictions that exist within the system in which we all work. Just as the reproduction of an artwork becomes stripped of its essence we should be asking; how critical can we be? And yet we do have a privileged position; by working with our colleagues at all levels and students we can use our voice to highlight these contractions. In the spirit of 68, students', workers and librarians unite, we have only our fees to lose....

Conference by: CALC (Critical Approaches to Libraries Conference) are always looking for new ways to connect people to ideas around critical librarianship.

• https://sites.google.com/view/calcconfer...