Collegiality as a Weapon to Maintain Status Quo in a White-privileged and Entrenched LIS Academy

Abstract

This chapter provides a glimpse of an ongoing journey of library and information science (LIS) educators and social justice advocates speaking up and speaking out of efforts to decenter white privilege and dismantle its socially ingrained underpinnings that all take for granted in a typical southern university. The narrative is creatively developed to include scenarios of real and/or imagined situations that correlate white privilege in an LIS program with entrenchment within the grips of an emerging American academy. Insights might resonate with incidents of white supremacy and spread of white oppressions experienced nationwide in the entirety of the LIS professions and beyond. The chapter also develops scenarios in the use of collegiality as a weapon that white administrators and LIS faculty (along with those from other disciplines) use to silence efforts that challenge their white privilege and decenter their unfair and unjust infrastructural components in the entrenched academic institution.

Citation

Mehra, B., Bonnici, L. and MacCall, S.L. (2023), "Collegiality as a Weapon to Maintain Status Quo in a White-privileged and Entrenched LIS Academy", Black, K. and Mehra, B. (Ed.) Antiracist Library and Information Science: Racial Justice and Community (Advances in Librarianship, Vol. 52), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 123-138. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0065-283020230000052013