At the University of South Carolina, the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair, Dr. Nicole Cooke, has the honor of teaching a course entitled Critical Cultural Information Studies!

As part of the Fall 2021 iteration of this course (description below), there will be six amazing guest lectures that are being opened up to the larger LIS community (free and online)! Please join us for these tough, enlightening, action focused conversations!

Sessions will be held via Zoom on Thursday afternoons, at 4pm EDT, and they will be recorded and posted on this site at a later date.

Course Description

This course examines how issues of diversity, social justice, race, gender and sexuality are represented in the information professions and will study how these social imperatives affect, and are affected by, information technologies. Socially constructed (mis)representations (or lack of representations) of race, gender and sexual identity will be critically examined in different settings as they intersect, overlap, and impact the information use, technology practices, and the design of information resources and services in the processes of creation, organization, and dissemination of information in library and information science and related fields. This course will also provide a historical and contemporary overview of social justice and advocacy work in librarianship during the 20th and 21st centuries. The role of information services in social action will also be explored and the course will introduce prominent philosophical and pedagogical concepts related to social justice, as well as researchers and proponents of marginalized or “underserved” groups.