Non-Judgment as Praxis: Inhabiting the Messy Middle of AI and Information Literacy

Maria T. Accardi, Indiana University Southeast

July 16th 9:30 a.m. - 10:45 a.m. (In-person at EKU)

Strong and polarizing positions on generative AI now shape our current information landscape as academic librarians grapple with questions of ethics, authorship, and whether AI belongs within information literacy instruction at all. Yet within these conversations, particularly in the critical librarianship sphere, I am struck by a turn toward moralizing judgments about AI use. This approach sits uneasily alongside a tradition that has long foregrounded nuance, power, and context in analyzing sociotechnical systems.  

What happens when this moralization migrates into our teaching? How does it shape what students feel permitted to ask, disclose, or experiment with? And who, in turn, is most likely to be read as “misusing” AI? When we moralize AI use, we risk reproducing the very hierarchies of authority and legitimacy that critical information literacy has long sought to disrupt.  

In this keynote, I argue that a framework of non-judgment, grounded in trauma-informed and feminist pedagogies, offers a necessary reorientation for our praxis. Rather than positioning AI use as a problem to police and monitor and manage, this approach invites us to contemplate student engagement with AI as situated, strategic, and constrained by the same inequities that have always structured access to information.  

By attending to psychological and relational safety in the learning environment, librarians can shift from surveilling and adjudicating student behavior to fostering critical, transparent, and reflective engagement with AI. The goal is not to resolve the tensions AI introduces, but to help learners navigate them, making visible the contexts, trade offs, and power dynamics that shape how they meet their information needs.