For the exploration of principles of social and cultural justice in preparation for our careers as library and information study professionals, I’m leaning hard into my belief that the library is transformative.  I’ve selected the One-Shot Lesson Plan I taught, my Rubric, Assessment, and Exit Ticket from that session, as well as the slides used to teach it from LS 527: Information Literacy. As you can see this is also related to democracy. It’s focused on teaching fellow LIS professionals how to relate concepts to democracy when teaching information literacy to their own future students. I discuss why their students might feel disillusioned with democracy and explain the negative impacts that has on social and cultural justice of all kinds.

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My second submission for this learning objective is a video I made as my final for LS 590: Data Bias with Dr. Laura Bonnici on biases in our sociopolitical economic systems. Governments and economies are essentially all made up, but they also exist as large complicated systems that could be described as cybernetic, meaning they react to feedback. They could also be thought of as a counterweight to the “slow a.i.’s” of corporations that act to maximize gains while unloading all of their externalities on society (Schneier, 2023). This is a large portion of why sustainability is such an important concept to the field, but either way we want to work to eliminate bias in all of the systems that we use as that makes them more socially and culturally just.

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I look forward to entering the field of academic librarianship, even if it is undergoing radical changes. I’ve come across bloggers who believe that the entire system of higher education will collapse after being hollowed out by neoliberalism and it will be brought about by the actions of the current regime attacking specific universities, the funding mechanisms that underlie the entire system of higher education, and a terror campaign against students, members of our communities, for nothing more than exercising their first amendment rights (Burke, 2025). It’s not necessarily going to be easy going into the field of library and information studies at this point, but I’ve finally found a purpose I believe in, that I can support and work towards. A situation where I strongly agree with the core values that underpin the entire profession, as opposed to working at an internet company and agreeing with the core values in so much as was possible while still doing best-in-field customer service to a company that was going to be bought out by Amazon.com.

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References:

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Burke, T. (2025, February 6). Academia: what they are about to take from you. Eight by Seven. https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/academia-what-they-are-about-to-take

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Schneier, B. (2023, November 27). AI and Trust. The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. https://www.belfercenter.org/publication/ai-and-trust#:~:text=Science%20fiction%20writer%20Charlie%20Stross,to%20achieve%20that%20singular%20goal.