Libraries for social change: centering youth of color and/or LGBTQ youth in library practice
Critically aware libraries are capable of providing meaningful services to youth made most vulnerable to the state through surveillance, policing, and incarceration. This research traces how past policies and processes that established white, middle-class, and hetero-normative conduct and knowledge as central to library services worked - and continue to work - against youth of color and/or LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth. It pulls from queer, feminist, poststructural, and critical theory to provide a model for how libraries can center youth made vulnerable to the state. This involves an interrogation of what representation does or can do in the current moment alongside the recognition that cultures within librarianship inhibit library access for youth of color and/or LGBTQ and gender non-conforming youth. Through four iterative case studies set in Oakland, CA, this research draws lines of inquiry from perspectives of youth located in juvenile detention to community and public library services. These cases are directed by participatory action research and situated forms of grounded theory. Together, the cases incorporate youth voice into actionable outcomes in library practice and challenge narratives of literacy as simply ameliorative while recognizing the limitations publishing practices place on encounters with complexly diverse library materials. Guided by statements from incarcerated youth and youth contributions to The Beat Within alongside activist and academic understandings of social change, this research contains models for library collections and services that challenge static notions of identity categories, answer youth requests for materials, and provide frames for confronting institutional racism and other forms of oppression in library services to youth.
California, Collection development, Critical theory, Incarcerated people, Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ), Juvenile detention, Libraries, Oakland, Restorative justice, The Beat Within, Youth
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign