Beyond “Ignorance” and EDI: Critiquing LIS Accounts of Islamophobia

Salma Abumeeiz, Research and Instruction Librarian, University of California, Los Angeles

To what degree does the field of LIS (Library and Information Studies) acknowledge and recognize Islamophobia, and in what ways is it framed? By exploring LIS accounts of Islamophobia, and building off of a growing body of literature that offers a critique of mainstream liberal racial politics within LIS (Hudson, 2017, 2020; Seale & Mirza, 2016), my project will highlight the limitations of using the framework of EDI to understand race and power. Drawing on preliminary findings, my work seeks to (1) highlight prevailing understandings of Islamophobia in LIS— including where it comes from, how and to what extent it operates, who is responsible, and how it is best addressed; and (2) assert an alternative lens for understanding Islamophobia within and related to libraries, one that considers the library world’s entanglements with structures of racialized oppression. In particular, I will offer a critical assessment of the individualist terminologies of EDI that characterize LIS accounts of Islamophobia, namely, the framing of such as “ignorance,” “hatred,” and “bigotry.” In doing so, I will underscore the broader absence of structural critique within the field’s understanding of racialized violence, thereby encouraging the field to reckon with and confront Islamophobia—and racialized oppression more generally—to its full extent. The proposed presentation will offer an introductory outline of the scope and impetus for this project, as well as initial findings gathered from EDI publications on Islamophobia in libraries. 

Bibliography 

Hudson, David James. “On ‘Diversity’ as Anti-Racism in Library and Information Studies: A Critique.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 1, no. 1 (2017). 

Hudson, David James. “The Displays: On Anti-Racist Study and Institutional Enclosure.” up//root, October 22, 2020. 

Seale, Maura. Compliant Trust: The Public Good and Democracy in the ALA’s “Core Values of Librarianship.” Library Trends, 64(3). (2016).

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