Students will practice principles of social and cultural justice in their preparation for careers in library and information environments.

One of the primary reasons that I chose the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Alabama was because of its objective in asking students to consider ethical and social justice principles as a fundamental part of LIS. This wasn’t because I had a particular desire to study classes in the field of social and cultural justice, but because I knew that it would be a topic of consideration in every class I chose to pursue. In a library world filled with issues like neutrality, intellectual freedom, diversity, and access, to ignore social justice as done in previous generations of librarianship is to ignore the principles that make us truly unique as a profession, and despite my many years in the field already, I truly believe that this objective at SLIS was admittedly my weakest when entering the program.

My earliest exploration of social justice and some of these basic principles came in Dr. Yates’ section of Information in Communities (LS 501) as we were given hundreds of examples of how the core values of the American Library Association (ALA) deeply intersected with those in social justice. In my final essays in this class, I was able to feebly grasp to this overlap and express my desire to uphold the principle of access while also admonishing the belief that libraries should remain neutral. These early assignments and essays helped me to gain a better understanding of how the core values in librarianship can be more fully applied in my career and allowed me to make an initial declaration that I would advocate for social justice ideologies.

It was my immediate application of the principles of social justice in which I quickly became enamored, and while there are many other examples of my work in classes that highlight this, two key examples stand out. In Dr. Burgess’ Information Ethics (LS 515), we were assigned a presentation on an ethical dilemma in library science. I focused on the specific situation where a library might be asked to uphold its values in freedom of access by providing meeting space to a hate group which could infringe upon the safety and fair use of the library for a marginalized group. I was surprised that my solution to this particular dilemma focused on writing sound policy as a means to minimize the impact of hate speech and the influence of a hate group, and as a library manager, it cemented the power of policy in my mind as a tool for advocacy, good, and especially social justice.

In Jen Gerber’s Public Libraries course (LS 530), I was tasked to write a letter in response to a fictional intellectual freedom challenge. Doing so led to an opportunity to better train my work team and our library system on these types of encounters, and I became better prepared for the inevitable challenges yet to come when working in a region rife with them. Advocacy has always been a key part of my leadership style in libraries, but by better understanding how core values interact with social justice principles, I am ready to advocate for changes in library leadership that will lay a new foundation for the marginalized and oppressed. And by continuing to do so as a leader in libraries, I hope to have a significant