 Hi everyone and thank you for joining us today for a training on Library Services for Incarcerated People in the LIS classroom. This training is part of San Francisco Public Library's JL and Reentry Services departments expanding information access for incarcerated people grant work, which is made possible with funding from the Mellon Foundation. This training will be posted and publicly available on the YouTube channel for JL and Reentry Services at SFPL and will also be available through the American Library Association's Learning Management System. If you'd like to receive a certificate for participating in this training, please sign in through the ALA Learning Management System and view the training there. You can receive a certificate for free for viewing this training. Today we'll hear from a number of speakers who are incorporating information about Library Services for Incarcerated People into their Library and Information Science classrooms. But first we'll begin by hearing from Darius Coleman about his own lived experience. My name is Darius and I am a formerly incarcerated adult who has been entered out of the criminal justice system and I struggle with homelessness in addition since the age of 15. The reason why I bring up my struggles is because I have spent decades of my life trying to escape my reality. The year 2017 started with me continuing the cycle of incarceration I had created for myself. While I was inside the jail, I would continue to find ways to escape my harsh reality by reading books to occupy my time. Any book I could give my hands on, the bigger the fantasy, the less I saw my reality. The Public Library Jail and Reentry Services would come into each living unit of the jail with a quart of books. I remember first thinking, look at all those new books. The librarians would ask me about some of my challenges I faced and would print out resources to assist me re-entrant society. When the Public Library Reentry Service entered the living unit, they introduced me to a variety of books that brought me into reality such as self-help books, books of people who had similar struggles and obstacles and faced throughout my life and how they overcame them and most importantly books on how to build a business from the ground up. The reason why that is so important to me is because upon my release January 2020 and with the resources combined with the self-help books, I developed a new mindset that gave me a new perspective on life. I was able to get into a treatment program, gain full-time employment, start a small business and publish a book that give people with the same struggles I faced hope and I owe a big part to the Public Library Reentry Services for helping me put together my foundation. Thank you. Darius, thank you so much for sharing that information with us and with all of our viewers and you know we're really as librarians proud to be part of your journey. We know too that your story is not is it's unique to you but it's also just a statement of the profound value of libraries inside and the importance of doing this work and we also hear through work that we do with LAS students and interns that there's a lot of interest in doing this work even though there aren't a lot of programs like ours and so I think part of the value of this training is really that it'll help support other instructors in Library and Information Science to bring this topic into their own classrooms because we know there is interest from students and we know as your testimony gives that there is a real need for more library services inside. So just thank you. Hello, my name is Shonda Smith-Cruz. I go by Sean. Thank you for tuning in. I want to introduce you to a project called the Reference Letters to Incarcerated Peoples Project. It is a course integrated project with the Pratt School of Library Information Science or rather Pratt School of Information. I'm an Agents Assistant Professor at the Pratt School of Information and I teach the course 652 Reference and Instruction. I've been doing it for about five years or 11 courses now. I'm also an Associate Dean for Teaching, Learning, and Engagement at New York University Division of Libraries so I'm excited to share the work with you. I'm going to turn my camera off as we go in but let's get started. What we're going to cover today is first an overview of the Reference Letters to Incarcerated Peoples Project. I'm going to discuss sort of the critical analysis and critical pedagogy that's interwoven into the class, go over the course's components, and also provide some testimonials or student feedback and then just end with considerations for what you should think about if you want to integrate this into your class. So first, what is the Reference Letters to Incarcerated Peoples Project or program? I go back and forth. This is, it's a course integrated experience. It's run through the New York Public Library's Jail and Prison Services Division where people who are incarcerated send letters to the public library and then the library hosts a series of volunteers to answer those questions in addition to the staff, the very small staff that they have. The collaborative relationship allows for the students who are receiving their MLIS to integrate real-time reference work into their learning. The collaboration is beneficial for the New York Public Library staff to receive support from volunteer help but it's structured volunteer help. On average every month the New York Public Library's Jail and Prison Services departments receive over 90 letters from incarcerated people from across the country who are requesting reference service. Volunteers go through a series of training in order to answer the letters in a uniform way and it is the collaboration with the Library Science Program at the Pratt School of Information that really allows for this to become a sustainable model at scale. Many volunteers who continue to staff the Public Library service have come via the Pratt collaboration. What do I mean when I say by scale? So because the reference and instruction course is a core course at the library school every student runs through this class and it's also one that everyone who graduates gets to say they participated in. So if we look at these numbers at the screen each student provides or answers three letters per semester. A section has about at most 18 students I think my smallest section had eight so you have eight to 18 students per class per session and there's always about two sections of the course and so with that in mind we're answering 48 to 108 letters a year and I think a few semesters we've had three courses so it can even add another 48 numbers to that. So that means that we get to have 200 to 250 letters a year answered as a result of this program through the Pratt School of Information. The letters are being answered not only by the student but they're being vetted by myself as the professor and each of these students has the opportunity to meet with the New York Public Library staff person to think through how they might answer these questions in a uniform way. So I want to jump back and talk a little bit about how it is possible to incorporate that work into the class. The type of work does take some energy to coordinate and it has to be considered if you really want to think about this as sustainable and how it might integrate into the larger course. As a result of that the reference services to incarcerated people's project takes up 35 percent of the grade for the course. It does alongside this work that I also provide. The students also undertake a group project for where they create a live guide or a web resource. That's 30 percent. They have to do a demonstration in front of class and their lesson plan that's 20 percent. They create a personal statement that's five percent and then their class participation is 10 percent and it's sort of a catch all everybody participates. But now I want to jump to how sort of it applies not just in a structural way but critically. Like how can we not only provide a service a real-time service but also how do we contextualize this work for students as they embark on their MLIS journey. When considering criticality and how it's applied for this course the critical concepts are interwoven throughout the semester's readings. It's one of the it's a sort of very focused component of the class from day one. I apply the Association for College and Research Libraries frameworks or the ACRL frameworks as functions for integrative learning. Meaning that we think through how each of the frames is applied to reference service and to instruction. Alongside ACRL I also foreground political perspectives into the curriculum and so most of this comes from the readings but also in our conversations, intergroup work, in how they provide their demos, the communities that they think about, as well as the topical lip guides that they create along with their groups. The political perspectives that I make sure to incorporate are anti-racist or rather perspectives that incorporate anti-racism not only from within LIS but also across ethnic studies so we're bringing in authors from across fields. Centipensantes which is sensing, thinking, pedagogy and it aims to incorporate a worldview thinking one that is not centering western concepts but centers concepts from communities across various global landscapes. Feminist practice or considerations of how gender is relative to reference services especially at the desk for example. Neutrality comes up where we think about whiteness and structural racism and how neutrality is complicit with this and all of the topical sort of foreground and political perspectives are grounded in critical race theory and we use the core tenets of critical race theory and think about how it shows up in libraries and then of course how race shows up in this project. I wanted to make sure that you know that you can look to the syllabus to see which readings have been used. The Pratt syllabus archive is available online, openly accessible. You just have to search on Google Pratt syllabus archive and here it is you can go into this Google Drive folder and the archive the syllabi from 2011 all the way to 2023 are posted in the Google Drive folder. So if we went to say spring of 2022 you could see the syllabus for every class and so my this course is 652 and there I go 652 Smith Cruz. I taught two sections in that spring so you have two two sections to look at but there was also another section taught by another professor so you could see how we've differed our approach to this program within our syllabus which I'm not going to click on but you can do so on your own. I also wanted to talk about the structure of the course. I think it's important to note that the course itself is extremely it does require some the project requires some structure in order to align it with the course. Actually I am going to go in here I'm sorry that I jumped around but I'm going to scroll down past the course goals to this assignments at a glance so you can see how we organized not only the course the assignments but then also what the students have to do and what they have to deliver and how the dates are organized and so you see that each letter is actually 18 pages long and that means that they have to deliver it timely but also deliver it comprehensively afterwards they have a final report for which they have to discuss their experience writing the letter. I also wanted to show what a typical day would look like and so in the class itself we're at the start of the class we bring in readings by say Jennifer Ferretti on neutrality or Fubazi Etar on intersectionality but each class also has an active learning strategy and we start with critical librarianship neutrality and intersectionality to then get to a second class where Emily Jacobson who is the representative of the New York Public Library Prison Services, Gell and Prison Services Department comes and talks about the program and she actually goes through the various components of the work. The four students meet with Emily they're asked to read her article which is a chapter that references this actual program and it's in the text Reference Librarianship and Justice that's edited by Liam Maddler, Ian Bellin and Eamon Tool and that's actually a core reading for the class. The last thing I'll say is that the students are assigned letters every class. The first one for this quote class they got five letters the next one they got four and so every class we provide letters to the students to choose from. All right now I'm going to go back into the structure because I think when she saw that this will make more sense. It is very important that second class that the student introductory session allows for the student to have questions ready for the public librarian who is going to sort of overview this service but also talk about what it means to be a librarian who provides work in or against prisons. So that is a really formative moment for students to really get to the basis of what this work is and how it impacts on a broad scale. We also have them read the book chapters so that they're able to articulate what questions came up for them. We talk about what the rules are in reference to the letters and how they you know what the rules are for the program itself. What are the restrictions that prisons pose upon the receipt of these letters and we also read through every letter together out loud and I actually do that in every class that they're assigned. We scaffold throughout the semester so that means if there are 18 students and three letters per student I have to have enough letters per class to allow for the last distribution of letters to give time for students to then write their final paper. One thing that's interesting is we never share a sample of an answered letter so students are only hearing about the rules in the process from our conversations and that's because we don't want them to think about a structure that they have to fit into or a template they have to fit into. Instead we say here's how you you know sort of post a letter like deer blank and then sign blank. Everything in between is up to you to make that concerted decision about how you want to lay out the design of this letter onto the page so that it's readable in print by someone who may for example not have not be able to have a letter stapled because staples wouldn't be possible so that it would be something that could fall and get out of order so how do you think about the organization of the letter in that regard. Once students have written their third letter then they're eligible to write their final paper. What's great about the final paper is it asks them to not only discuss their process but we want to have them overview everything that they've done as a potential librarian. What resources did they use? What search strategies did they apply? Talk about that process and those resources. Did you use newspapers, library databases, the open web, blogs, video screenshots? Did you download PDFs that are for forms that someone asked for? Did you go to government information and resources? So think about that as your practice but then also very important supply a reflection on how the project includes a critical consideration. So how does reference services, how does this work implicate access in terms of people who are in or outside of the prison system? How is, how can we be critical of our roles as librarians and what does this structural volunteer program say about the prison industrial complex? I have the students site authors from the syllabi but I also want them to speak from the first person and really have this be a reflective assignment. There's also a component of student learning outcomes at the end that they have to supply. So I wanted to sort of round this out with some testimonials from students who have provided the service just to hear what their final papers said and these were two that I thought were really useful and I asked their permission and I asked them to agree to the quote that I use and so this was from Sadie Rain Hope Gunn who was a student in 2020. She's already since graduated and is now working at the New York Public Library interestingly in their performing arts division and her paper was reflecting on a letter that requested information about Santeria and every semester we get a letter on this and usually the person who writes it is asking so that they can distribute it among those that they are incarcerated with and so Sadie says and I quote to think of the enslaved Africans who brought this religion to new lands and have it survive to think of the man writing to me trying to learn more about a religion that had already been so policed and persecuted. It was incredibly heavy thinking about the strains that this information is faced in being passed down not only as a religion but also as an ancestral practice and inherently radical and sacred connection to the world. The only hopeful feeling was that this man was practicing and disseminating African ancestral practices from hundreds of years ago to other men around him in search of guidance and spiritual connection. The next reflective quote was from Chris Jacobs just this past fall so Chris was a current student and he really well I'll just read what he had to say. He was thinking about sort of the archive and these letters and his letter his reflection wrote I have no way of knowing of course if these letters will actually enter the personal archives of the recipients they may never reach them may never be read maybe read once and discarded I have no sense of prison policies for the keeping of personal effects and papers maybe they will be seized and destroyed in some petty and arbitrary exercise and punitive authority. If they do make it to their recipients however I find it hard to believe they would not take on some special significance considering the environment in which they are consumed and environment in which agency and information are so circumscribed. As stated by the ACL frames the format and context of an information object are part of what gives it value and meaning quote from ACL information creations are valued differently in different contexts such as academia or the workplace. The extreme context of incarceration must have a commensurate extreme effect on this process of evaluation so finally I want to end with considerations for putting this work into your course I think it's highly valuable if you want to adopt it just know that it's a lot of work and it takes a lot of time not only when you go home to help walk through every week the five letters that may have been distributed that week but the instructional time and every class students are going to we're going to read these letters together and then they have to sort of like talk about it it's it's priceless you can't have any other supplement for that kind of learning but it does take some coordinated instructional time. When you're going to edit it what I do is I ask people if they know that weekend they have a friend coming over or they have a big assignment they should not request a letter that weekend because they have the one week to write to do the 18 page letter so they have to you have to think about the editing practice and time and the labor each week for yourself and for your students to make sure that these letters look good and they they read well and they can be seen and then finally I would say positionality but not all students are going to come to this assignment with excitement for we vote Veronica Ariano Douglas's mutuality and reference that they are going to learn from this just as much as the the requester will learn so you have to get them there right and so that to me is where the learning happens but that's the labor on your part as an instructor so I think incorporating this work into the experiences of all via the readings that's one way to get them into it but also just that dialogue that participation that conversation that was active learning strategies that's going to get people kind of in a mutual learning experience with these letters and so that's it from me thank you for listening I wanted to make sure that you have the Pratt syllabus archive the reference librarianship and justice history practice and praxis text that does have Emily Jacobson's article that discusses this project and thank you very much if you have any questions you can always email me I've had this email address for 10 years shanta smith cruise at gmail.com and I'm so happy to answer any of your questions right hi everyone I'm Melissa via Nicholas I'm an associate professor at the graduate school library and information studies at the University of Rhode Island thank you so much to San Francisco public libraries jail and reentry services for inviting me to participate in this conversation and just for their partnership over the years with our program I go ahead and turn off my video and then I can start presenting so I want to talk about teaching incarceration in LIS and how I go about doing that there are so many reasons why I incorporate talking about incarceration in LIS it was hard to like boil it down or rain it in so this isn't a comprehensive list of course but really we need to read talk about an analyze incarceration in the U.S. in LIS because it touches so many points of our field some of my priorities for incorporating incarceration in the curriculum is first this idea of giving information context our students will be library and information professionals in a world where incarceration is normalized and invisible and highly visible in the U.S. incarceration is an institution that's constantly present but not always seen in everyday life so I want to train them to understand the context and the institutionalization of incarceration I want them to know some background information about incarceration and in LIS that's what we call a giving information context so we're not just performing an information service for a particular population but understanding the context for that exchange so one example of this is that students to understand the numbers in incarceration that nearly 2.3 million people are incarcerated in the U.S. and a large population is people of color blacks and Latinx folks especially and there's a growing population of women that are incarcerated that prison labor generates billions of dollars in profits which government and private corporations share and that the prison strikes of 2016 and 2018 attest to the low wage and these labor practices so I just want our students to know that incarceration is a part of our everyday lives whether we see it or not. Second that the incarceration industry overlaps with our field in more ways than we might notice Dr. Jeannie Austin calls this large population of incarcerated and formerly incarcerated populations as this unseen invisible public so if we're talking about a library space in a public library or academic library it's like who's not there at that time who's missing and this is a large chunk of the public population. Dr. Austin says scholars and activists have established that the structuring power of white supremacy shapes the landscape of the prison and perceptions of who constitutes the public especially as people in jail and prison are removed from association with the public and public spaces and also prison labor is often used in university infrastructures maybe even libraries as well so the University of Rhode Island my workplace uses furniture assembled in the Department of Corrections my own department has refused to purchase this so we use like 1970s office furniture or I used a lot of stuff that I found on the sidewalk or eventually just bought my own or bought mine with my professional funds we tend to buy our furniture with our professional funds now that's not like to boycott that prisoners are building quality furniture but it's more the concern about low wages paid in prisons and that prison becomes an industry that makes money so you want more people incarcerated to work at lower wages so that's our concern and then and if you want to see you can go to correctional industries dot doc dot ri dot gov back slash shops back slash furniture I have that in my notes as well to see basically the whole state of Rhode Island purchases the incarceration furniture finally incarcerated formerly incarcerated and community members are intimate um with of this part of this pipeline pipeline are also intimate within the library so it's not just like our patrons are incarcerated but students have incarcerated loved ones um you know patrons in libraries that are in the public or in academic libraries probably have incarcerated loved ones um I had incarcerated family members and incarcerated loved ones so it's like just making visible that those people are intimately in in our lives so in this presentation I want to identify a variety of approaches for incorporating information and incarceration into coursework identify pedagogical tools for student reflection and increase awareness of pressing issues on incarceration in the library um my coursework in general focuses on reference and information behavior and I also manage a track called information equity diverse communities and critical librarianship within this track I or and in general I teach searching for answers meeting users information needs social justice and youth literature critical disability approaches to lis the history of libraries and multiculturalism and libraries so really incarceration can be taught in any of these courses through many interests so I'll just touch on a few um in searching for answers I'll cover a little bit more about how we've collaborated with reference by mail with the San Francisco public library but um I noticed that Dr. Austin's work really hits home in searching for answers and in other classes because they point out um that incarcerated people are this invisible public in social justice and youth literature and searching for answers our introduction to reference class the article and by Dr. Austin entitled critical issues in juvenile detention center libraries um it really hits home for students I noticed that it kind of turns on a light bulb for some or gives language of experiences for others um so that helps students sort of see how um incarceration how librarianship is done with incarceration and at the youth level um in social justice and youth literature um we also talk about incarceration through young adult books so the lis student deciding how they're going to choose in their collection books about incarceration um we want to know how to choose culturally competent books so these are some examples of books that they might choose and we really do that by making sure we're looking through helpful book lists so these examples came from socialjusticebooks.org those book lists prioritize like authenticity um that there are a lot of people of color that are authors um and that the books are varied so that the main character is um not it's not just about incarceration but the main character might have very nuanced experience through um that storyline um so some example some of the examples of children's literature is visiting day by Jacqueline Woodson mama's nightingale by edwidge dantecott um youth young adult literature they can read from the desk of zoe washington by jane marx um santiagos wrote home by alexandra Diaz and really what i want students to do is identify like how are they going to find um solid books for their library collections and um and then reading the text to understand nuance and then in my class multiculturalism in libraries um this is a introductory course and it's covers a broad range of topics so um we read in general about incarceration in libraries and in this class we read dr austin's work restorative justice as a tool to address the role of policing incarceration um in the lives of the in the us in the lives of youth in the us um we also read the new jim crow by michelle aixander and we've just taken on the book cast by isabel wilkerson to really understand like race and incarceration in the us um so those are all texts that i found students really work through and when they read dr austin's work restorative justice they i like that because they start to identify alternatives to policing in the library um they some folks identify that how their family members have been policed in the library so there's a lot of conversation that comes out of that so um i want to explore real quick how um we do reference by mail in lsc 504 this is searching for answers meeting users information needs and um in this course we partner with the san francisco public library um to answer letters to incarcerated patrons so this class partners with the san francisco public library to answer letters um through their reference by mail program through reference by mail students answer reference inquiries from incarcerated patrons through snail mail the learning objectives for this assignment are to read reflect and analyze incarceration systems um in the us to research and respond to written reference letters with reflection on rusa standards and sfpl training guidelines to build group work skills in responding to reference by mail letters and to advance perspectives of liberation and alternative formations to the carceral states students are given a lecture and a training from sf the sfpl librarian and we lead with the understanding that incarceration is constructed around formation of race class gender disability sexuality and citizenship in the us we use critical race theory and theories of racial capitalism as a foundation for this assignment and we adapt crt observations to lis so we acknowledge that racism is endemic to us life lis mischallenge the historicism and pursue a contextual analysis of social issues crt is an interdisciplinary set of research practices that are still evolving and need to be applied to lis in depth and crt should incorporate common experiences and shared experiences as the other that oppressed people bring to the struggle to reshape knowledge race is always central to the analysis of social issues and librarianship when using crt as a framework so for this assignment students read some of the new jim crow by michelle alexander reference services to incarcerated people with debbie ravine and emily drabinsky and genie austin's restorative justice as a tool to address the role of policing incarceration in the lives of youth in the united states students are given an orientation to the program overall they're broken up into groups and they determine a group leader and various group roles and they agree upon times and deadlines and then they the first day during their orientation they sign a group contract on their role and responsibilities and the timing of the letters they'll be answering they receive letters bi-weekly and usually they do around three or four rounds of letters so each student gets their own letters they work on responses within sfpl's guidelines and the roles and then there's really a back and forth process and what i noticed is that revise and resubmit process is actually really really valuable even though it can be frustrating like for all of us when we're doing work where we receive revisions but the students learn so much they're given so much detail from sfpl librarian or they might create rubric of the guidelines and what they're looking for and responding to letters and they might get feedback from their peers and this is sort of where they work out responding with a really quality letter and so they do that over the whole semester and they write a final reflection where they're reflecting on the process on the information that they provided and the revisions and then they're reflecting on the bigger picture of incarceration in the united states so they're required to bring in those theories that they read on on incarceration so i'm trying not to assume that incarceration is separate or out there from the classroom students have incarcerated family members or have been incarcerated themselves or have incarceration impact them in other ways we want to resist the missionary approach to incarceration where information is viewed as a service or provides this function that is not necessarily a critical exchange over the years we've had students discuss how they had family and friends who are incarcerated and how this experience kind of might have changed the perspective or made them more like intimately understand the experience of incarceration so i use a tool every week called my metacognitive reflection and i built this out of a book i believe it's called teaching and learning for impact that i'll put it in my notes so i built it out of a sort of pedagogical teaching book um and i want to make space for weekly quick writes they can hand write it speak it draw do a video or audio or handwritten journal entries where they respond to reflection questions without necessarily having to like cite academic work um this metacognitive work is really for them to step back and think about how how are they learning or how are they reacting to the work and what they're learning um metacognitive and metacognition is to see how and what we learn from a bigger picture to get to this point in our own learning cognition quick writes and reflections on our own thoughts and feelings are an important way of seeing our process so that's helpful i also tell them um i'm not gonna like this this might be controversial or like can be contested but i don't read it or listen to it because i really want them to have like a freedom just to speak or reflect um through embodiment and so in some way so as long as there's something turned in there weekly they get points and i don't want them to think i'm like judging the process necessarily i do that a lot for the information equity tracks as they sort of process a new information um because i think it's helpful for them to like digest their own bigger project process of it so right now um incarceration in my own work um has come up a lot in the research i've been doing recently in it certainly overlaps with lis um i'm focusing on my upcoming book data borders how silicon valley is building an industry around immigrants and how detention incarceration and deportation are systems of data gathering and surveillance and how that surveillance touches the edge of everyone's everyday lives so um here are like some examples of ice contracts with different major companies um companies that are in the library and then companies that we just interact with in everyday lives um the lexus nexus database is one example of how department of homeland securities ice and border patrol are constantly networked into our data for immigration immigrant surveillance lexus nexus has historically been an information management tool um and has moved into sort of big data management um and they've actually been partnering with ice for a long time like i think a decade um they partner with ice to allow access to people's data and to gather data on and document a people um the ethical concern here is that a professional and academic within lis as professionals and academics within ls we teach these databases um to our students who go on to teach them in the library of course um and you know we conduct tutorials on these databases we retrieve information with these databases um data is gathered through lexus nexus um and it's called lex ids people who have digital footprints um have a large amount of data in lexus nexus whether they know it or not lex ids are unique identifiers that relix their larger corporation assigns to people like a social security number the company has them for over two-thirds of everyone in the us they probably have one for you says sarah landon who is a former librarian and is a law professor at cuny they are more intimate and powerful than your social security and they can tell the government everything about you and they're updated in real time so um neither relix group lexus nexus or tomson routers can ensure that they're providing comprehensive complete or accurate data tomson router at routers admits that your data could be mixed up with other people's data and the companies don't recommend depending on their data for any person purpose um i personally did retrieve my data through lexus nexus and i got like 70 pages of personal data about myself that they had um been gathering um so it's a problem because of our own ownership of our data but also that it sort of collaborates with the larger project of ice of retrieving undocumented people's data um so my book data borders puts language to this emerging data border that we all live in by way of our data um i collaborate with undocumented DACA naturally citizen and permanent residents who have experienced detention deportation and incarceration in many ways um the people i interview are from my hometown and their friends of family and just people in my own network so i wanted to interview people who trust me and who feel comfortable being interviewed um but almost everyone i know has been in immigrant detention centers um so i want to collaborate with them to name this emerging state where we're constantly um in this data border to name what this data border is um so i wanted to talk a little bit about exciting aspects of my work because that can be a little bit of a downer um after describing and naming these emerging data borders in my book i utilize a method called reimagining techno futures reimagining techno futures as a method that imagines different borders and information technologies with people from my community in riverside county california um and this method uses imagination as a method of response to the state of data borders um i approach imagining different systems as a counter to the powerful mythos of storytelling shaped by silicone valley and ice and dhs um so i want to promote um undocumented people and specifically latinx immigrant communities um as reimagining techno futures and alternatives to borderlands um this is a method that comes from black feminist thought so sofia nobel and ruha benjamin and adria and mary brown have all talked about the power of imagining from underrepresented communities um so one example is um loose she came in 2001 right after 9 11 through the sania sidro border um and she came undocumented and so i asked her what would you build or create or imagine if you could build anything without limits and she said i would use her punzels paintbrush to paint anything and go through the painting i would go to my mom's house in mexico so she can't go back to mexico because she doesn't have citizenship so she hasn't seen her mom since she migrated over here and it's too dangerous for her to try to go back and cross back without citizenship so this is really just imagining alternatives to the sort of heavily surveilled technologies that these folks experience um one of my interview collaborators huana had um had been writing to incarcerated people like she's always had pen pals with incarcerated people for a long time so um one of her friends has sent us quite a few images of his artwork and we like we put it up in our little art space in our home so as she was describing data borders to him he sent this image that you see with the statue of liberty back as like how he interpreted um the book that she was describing to him um and that's really where i like he sent it years ago i think this is 2021 that's kind of what gave me the idea of the second part of the book of like reimagining states um and trying to illustrate what we're imagining um as teka who i interviewed said she would build a technology that could help remove the contamination of the world um she said a machine with filters that would clean out the air and the trash um oscar said he would create an app that lets people start over with a fresh start something that gives immigrants the option of not having a record including a record like for people who have been deported two or three times um just like people who get to change their name giving people a fresh start without that record and then on the far right that's the work i'm doing now so i'm working with um women that have come here undocumented and they have different levels of citizenship now um but we're kind of going back to the basics of like how would you imagine technology spaces like what would you how do you want to learn technology like as you're engaging in technology where what do you want to hear or see or feel or taste so um if you think of like the computer room how you would usually see a computer room that might be very closed in and a line of computers like these women would imagine way more light and air and plants and music and so just trying to go way back to like how do we design information spaces and how would latina immigrant communities do that um so general tips for faculty in lis um again i found a lot of students resonate with restorative justice i think it brings in a lot um of responses a lot of students are like when they learn about a social issue they want to say they want a response but they they're really challenged by this article um and i think they feel like it gives them alternative responses to incarceration and um policing in the library um from reflections and discussions i've noticed noticed that students find this helpful um in thinking differently like instead of calling the police they are seeking out de-escalation trainings um and then i recommend we also don't assume incarcerations out there like our students could have incarcerated family members or have been incarcerated themselves um i want to try to bring in like seeing these data borders in which we reside that can be challenging like i requested my lex id from lexus nexus and we have a right to do that but you have to have a driver's license or an id an address so there's a lot of privilege for that like i have to feel comfortable retrieving all the data that lex nexus has on me um through i t's and citizenship so that's one way to do it but it might um feel invasive to some students electronic frontier foundation has this great database called atlas um of surveillance where folks can look up their hometowns and see um what kind of surveillance technologies are being used in the their hometown for example my hometown of marietta has which has been cited for border detention center issues and poor conditions um when i look up marietta california in the outskirts of surveillance i can see that the marietta police department uses ring cameras and facial recognition software so we're just trying to local make local to my lis students like how resident these surveilling technologies are that lead to incarceration and um detention and one of my bigger challenges um in teaching all of this is um a lot of students and librarians you know we ask for a lot of librarian feedback in the las classroom and of course we have an advisory board so we're really connected to librarians that are currently like in their career so that we can support las students um and a lot of students and librarians really want students to come out with skills um there's a heavy emphasis on skills in las education so what i found challenging over the years is making the argument that when students read theories like critical race theory or theories around racial capitalism that is the skill students we know that lis is overwhelmingly white and that white students don't necessarily have a sort of advanced way of thinking about race like they weren't challenged to think about race from early on so there might be a lot of catching up to do with at least white students in las becoming more um sort of well versed in knowing about race and racism in the us so my challenge is valuing theory in las as a skill and that students really dig deep into um these readings um so that when they go into the workplace as librarians that skill will transfer over if they see policing in the library or a certain group of people that are being surveilled in the library um that they're going to think first about everything that they learned in library school and that that skill will transfer over okay thank you so much for your time okay welcome uh thank you for attending this informational session my name is Miriam Sweeney and i'm an associate professor at the school of library and information studies at the university of alabama before we begin i want to go ahead and thank sf pl's jail and reentry services team for developing this training session and and congratulate them of course on their sponsorship from the melin foundation for their funded project expanding information access for incarcerated people this is such important work and it's really exciting um also that ala can um support and partnership with these training sessions so it's a pleasure to be invited to this project and also a pleasure to be along featured alongside the other presenters for these trainings okay i'm going to go ahead and turn off my camera so i can go ahead and start let's see all right so in today's session i'll be talking more about how library and information science educators so lis for those of you who might not be initiated might create space across their curricula for information conversations and critical reflection about incarceration including things like the history of mass incarceration in the united states intersections of libraries and policing the role of information technologies as carceral technologies and also possibilities for abolitionist librarianship um lis is an interdisciplinary and people-centered discipline and because of this it has many different entry points for teaching and learning about incarceration so my goal is to represent uh some of these ideas for where footholds might occur and the curriculum so that um so that others listening may adapt and innovate in ways that that that fit your unique courses drawing from my own experiences teaching i will share how i've approached integrating these topics in and across the classes i've taught and also offer suggestions for other possible ways to highlight incarceration as a focal topic in lis education so this is not meant to be exhaustive um or a prescriptive way to approach these complex topics but i do hope this session will serve as just a starting place for considering how the topic of incarceration might be brought into many kinds of lis educational contexts so a little bit about me to situate the kinds of research i do and give more information about the kinds of courses i teach so i would characterize myself as a critical digital media and information scholar who studies things like interface design um chatbots and digital assistants voice interfaces artificial intelligence and big data infrastructures using lenses of race gender and sexuality in class starting points um to ask questions about how these things you know are shaped by and shape society in different ways and i've also conducted research around issues related to race and whiteness and um in sort of aspects of dei um and librarianship from a critical librarianship perspective so those perspectives are shared throughout the kind of research that i conduct so critical uh critical reflections critical uh cultural toolkits for instance so the classes i teach not surprisingly um overlap with these areas of research and expertise and uh i also bring some of these this information and perspective into other core classes as well so core classes i teach um are related to things about the social and cultural foundations of the profession and i have an example on the slide of two courses one is called information and communities um which is very much kind of an introduction to ethics and values of the profession things like that and then professional paths which really is meant to give students kind of a broad glimpse at the you know the different avenues within lis that might be available to them um especially for folks who you know prior to maybe starting school you know have either kind of a limited idea of what lis might be or maybe no idea at all right um we we get all kinds there and then with elective classes um i teach a course specifically focused on race gender and sexuality and lis and then also elective courses about sort of the technology sides of my interest so things like social aspects and information and also ai and society and so these are just some examples of the kind of courses i teach all of the classes i teach though starting with the core classes actively engage with concepts of structural power and draw on readings and theories from black indigenous people of color women queer lgbt qia disabled people in communities etc so i encourage students to ask questions about you know who gains from as well as who might be harmed by particular social arrangements institutions policies and systems and also whose voices and perspectives are missing or underrepresented in this conversation um so that i try to integrate throughout all of my classes as kind of a lens or an ethos and i try to normalize discussions from the start about white supremacy racism you know heteropatriarchy capitalism ableism etc as lis conversations as in here in lis we talk openly and honestly about power structures and we learn the language to name these systems when we see them as a toolset and so i find that this is particularly effective when paired closely with critical interpretations of ala core values such as social responsibility diversity access intellectual freedom democracy privacy right i guess i could name all of them here but they are also all interwoven aren't they but in short the vantage point of lis education the lens matters and has a lot of potential to lay a foundation for deeper conversations about incarceration and lis as a man profession so kind of going back to the framework of the core classes and the elective classes that i have i want to give folks an idea of how then to integrate these ideas across these different class clusters in introductory course classes lis students are often learning about aspects of library history you know different types of libraries and institutional contexts for lis work professional ethics core values and maybe also current events or issues in lis and basic service models and so you know here are some of the common topics that i cover in my core classes so institutional context for lis work information needs in a diverse society and core values discussions these are very prevalent you know focal thematic points and they happen to actually be wonderful areas to weave in examples that deal with incarceration and normalize including incarcerated people as part of the public or the communities that we often invoke in professional discourse but uncritically right so this is an opportunity to critically and actively include incarceration and incarcerated people and formerly incarcerated people into those conversations um so discussing institutionalized contexts i want to go into sort of each of those areas now and give some examples of how this might play out and along with you know again a non-exhaustive set of resources that i might use while reading having students read and talk about these things so in discussing institutional contexts for lis work i also include archival work in this since you know these things are are often taught together and interrelated but often touching on special library types such as medical law business academic and public libraries like those are traditionally introduced so this is a natural entry point to also discuss prison jail juvenile detention facility libraries as well maybe also immigrant detention centers as well um some of the readings on this slide that i have are readings that i have used um in the past to kind of open up some of those introductory conversations that help um you know ground the conversation about prison librarianship within you know and introduce sort of a critical um element and discussion to that and that's you know a kind of a key point of that lens that i was talking about before i find that the fenley invades uh you know gives a little bit of a background of the development of um of prison librarianship and kind of calls out different models um that we can then critically examine class you know such as sort of the the morality or um you know punitive models and things like that so we can name those and then together start a conversation of course the austin l2 2020 article um gets a really wonderful overview of again you know looking at this from a critical perspective and understanding how uh these uh how incarceration is shaped by and articulated through you know sets of oppressive systems so again in a starting conversation this begins to introduce um the the topics that we can scaffold and throughout the core classes in terms of thinking about how information needs come up in core classes just you know again kind of at an introductory level often conversations are really ripe for this including you know the kind of partnerships that public libraries have with with jails and prisons and in terms of you know there are different models for you know introducing students the idea that there are different models for this including sort of outreach integrative models as well reentry programs for formerly incarcerated people programming and resources for children or family members who have incarcerated loved ones or maybe again have other kinds of intimate experiences with incarceration um so you know there's there's numerous resources to share with students and point them to again as an introductory level adding that into the conversation so of course including the jail and reentry services from sfpl um and also the nypl jail and prison services links to their extensive programming and outreach efforts um and then also um other resources include you know lists of readings that offer you know intersectional injustice oriented resources for children and families affected by incarceration i have one listed from a reading list from the hennepin county library but there are many others that you know have kind of that critical perspective informing them that we want and then of course um this reading here by ring rows etc the libraries and reentry talking about library reentry programs for students who are just coming to the profession these are topics that i think don't often get the shine that other kinds of information need contexts get but are very easily integrated into that as kind of the you know the normal conversation that we have about information needs and a population that that you know deserves focal point as well and then lastly core values conversations are always extremely ripe for integrating conversations about the context of incarceration and how our core values need to be interpreted you know in these kind of contextual ways and situated ways so you know though we have a lot of conversations about intellectual freedom in conversations with my students i've i've noted that those conversations don't always come with you know kind of the natural conversation of like well what does it mean for prisoners right to read and you know the ways that freedom is constricted in particular contexts so that should be definitely always part of that conversation that the intellectual freedom has like so many overlaps here to think about conditions of access and you know in specific you know kinds of interventions into access i included the j-store access and prison link which is you know intervention to making j-store material available in presents right like there's all these interesting sort of access conversations that we could be having integrated into overall conversations about the core value of access privacy and confidentiality social responsibility all of things things go with this you know hand in hand as well i have a link to you know the pen america site which is a non-profit focused on the whole intellectual freedom and they have you know some wonderful reports about like you know the cost of reading the prisons in terms of censorship and e-reader tablets you know kind of integrating conversations about format and context and you know other things about access and you know and and publishers and gatekeeping right so the kinds of things that we are already talking about core values have these natural extensions over into an area that really you know where incarceration really has a lot to offer and challenge and extend ideas about how these core values are situated contextualized and like applied right in specific ways okay great so those are you know thinking about kind of just beginning discussions to introduce concepts and normalize them in the field in elective classes and advanced classes you have opportunities to kind of go deeper in different areas and you know spend more time with in-depth conversations so in my elective classes i tend to re-emphasize these same concepts by giving that in-depth treatment on topics you know such as the race gender and sexuality class for instance or by application to how information technology and AI are designed used and interpreted in society that's an interest of mine so that can factor in very easily to those classes as well but all these courses focus on issues of structural inequality, bias in systems and the institutional and technological histories that are rooted in systems of power and domination such as colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc okay so kind of taking the same approach the topics that i am going to focus on specifically kind of offering some entry point into are the in-depth exploration of structural inequality within the US is one topic that i highlight policing and libraries is another topic information technologies as carceral technologies and then lastly alternatives, resistance, and abolitionist strategies all can show up here so taking those one by one and looking at structural inequality in the US this conversation has to be present and scaffolded so that the rest of it makes sense right like we can't have conversations about incarceration in the field if we don't understand how incarceration is located in this environment you know as you know part of this larger sort of apparatus of policing and oppression and colonialism and racial supremacy right so primers on racial inequality and white supremacy are very important to give students the tools for this students are entering these conversations from different points some with sort of intimate knowledge of how these systems you know shape life opportunities and others are operating maybe from the position of never having thought about that a position of privilege right so it's really important I think to you know get this outlined like other speakers who have talked today you might see similar resources here Dr. Via Nicholas actually gave me the wonderful tip of integrating cast the origins of our discontents in our classes and I tried that for the first time this year and it was a really great addition to the race and gender class students loved it and she touches on so many things about racial inequality and inequality just sort of generally but but definitely also draws the linkages between you know from slavery to policing to and mass incarceration as well of course the new Jim Crow is another wonderful resource from Rooha Benjamin as well or the new Jim code is a wonderful resource from Rooha Benjamin as well and the new Jim code Jim Crow as well sorry let me get those two mixed up and then I had students watch the 13th documentary by Ava DuVernay and the race and gender class to get that longer you know history that again is very much detailed in the new Jim Crow but hearing it and seeing the footage and understanding it in that in the documentary way I find to engender really powerful conversations with students to help introduce them to the more detailed and longer trajectory of the history of mass incarceration and policing and then kind of talking about how the ideologies of like deficit based models and things still show up today the Yasso article whose culture has capital is kind of a classic one but can then be paired with you know authors like Austin and Bea Nicholas who are looking at ideas of the deficit model in how the profession has approach services to the incarcerated so there's a lot of wonderful sort of overlaps here and kind of a deeper grounding of the way that incarceration you know becomes a mode of inequality policing in and libraries so in this way I like to call attention to actively considering how libraries uphold carceral logics and policies they have the practices that we you know kind of take for granted and or normalize and the profession and then also relationships with the policing apparatus in different ways I really enjoyed the I really enjoyed the fry and rostin article I've highlighted here whose safety is the priority you know asking these questions about you know positionality and thinking about again you know for whom do these services serve and you know who is sort of already assumed to be at the margin or the threat you know in these in these models no holds barred policing and security in the public library is also a thoughtful piece as is marina belong beyond the police libraries as locations of carceral care they both touch on you know a lot of different topics the robbers and peas really is asking questions about the normalization of security and policing as an apparatus that becomes part of the library staff in the library landscape you know thinking about aspects of deescalation aspects of you know other ways of accountability and justice the marina article is wonderful for opening up that question beyond sort of having like literal police in the library but also just thinking about things like fines and you know how you know having fines is part of kind of a carceral logic of you know that punishes and is punitive and kind of based on the same sorts of moral assumptions that we see part and parcel with incarceration and policing as well so all of these open up a lot of sort of thoughtful conversation about what it means to really look at our own institutions and understand ourselves not as again separate from but part of these apparatuses and then lastly information in carceral technologies it's very important I think to introduce ideas about how surveillance and also sous valence sous valence is when we you know surveillance is kind of a top-down way of of looking and knowing sous valence is you know kind of more peer-to-peer the way that we maybe kind of surveil each other and police each other right and so some of the examples of that would be through discussions of facial recognition technology amazon ring border technologies right these kinds of technologies that we see all around us and that students might be familiar with personally but then also professionally increasingly as well and kind of understanding that the surveillance apparatus is connected to the policing apparatus right it's connected to the carceral system in these different ways so you know reading about reading about that right I have this article here the fresh the fresh teller amazon ring master the surveillance circulates that's really gives kind of a nice overview of the way that you know that amazon ring is actually integrated into policing structures and then also conversations about you know algorithmic bias predictive criminal sentencing sentencing models and big data in policing helping students and educating them to understand that bias and machines you know actually comes down to you know models of of harm and creating differential life opportunities and also tracking people into carceral systems and tracking people into into prisons right specifically so within those conversations we have you know we have some articles about the way that predictive policing models work we pull up you know the different sort of the models that are used by courts and see how like different things are kind of weighted and talk about the assumptions that are built into those we also look at you know sort of the border as another place where this is happening shannon latrin's piece all eyes on the border has a wonderful discussion of information technologies you know being used again to section off people into sort of acceptable versus non-acceptable citizens or participants in society through the carceral system as well so all of these are different you know entry points into the into thinking about how information technologies structure and you know and move people around through these systems as well and this of course is like a much larger topic that I could fit on the slide but it just gives you an idea of the kinds of things you might talk about here as you're talking about technology and and you know sort of basic technology literacies okay and then lastly resistance was the last category I had and this is again kind of all non-comprehensive as I'm talking about this I realize there's so many more things we could add in here but I do think that it's important to as we're critically analyzing these spaces of understanding incarceration you know through this critical lens that part of that is about understanding like what we would want instead right so I do think that it's important to introduce students the idea that there might be abolitionist strategies to employ and give lens to a new way of thinking about the work that is being done in LIS and institutions I like to introduce students to the abolitionist library association where they might find you know other like-minded professionals who would like to share ideas and network and talk about that the restorative justice as a tool to address the role of policing and incarceration is a wonderful example that opens up conversations along with other readings about restorative justice and what it means to really like rethink relationships that we have with each other and communities in the library in sort of a hands-on way right assumptions about about process about procedure about policing that really have become built into the way professional practice happens and you know what does it mean to resist and rethink and restructure those things I'd like to introduce also aspects of data justice that go along with the information technology things from the last slide and think about you know what does it mean to push back on sort of the big data apparatus that also is part of carceral institutions I love that feminist data manifests no from c4 at all a wonderful group of scholars who came together and put together you know this wonderful manifest no about you know sort of pushing back but offering that refusal has a long intellectual history as well when I'm doing other readings about that as a way to sort of to point out that like there are other ways to do things there are other there are and it's our responsibility to act right that I think sometimes students can feel rather impotent in these conversations but I find that conversations about resistance and about imagining futures right as as most of the Nicholas does and her book data boarders generates conversations to help students feel like you know cognitively unstuck around that and that there's something to fight for you know this is there's an action there and a call to action I think that's a very important part of this conversation okay and so just to bring us home here some questions I was asked to think about for this training one was what challenges do you face in terms of teaching about incarceration and LIS educational settings and I would say one of the largest challenges is simply that students are coming to you with so from so many different places right so many different kinds of lived experience they're bringing different life experiences and expectations to the conversations for instance some folks have never talked about incarceration before it may not have experience but intimately while others have direct lived experiences with the subject matter and that's hard I mean as an instructor it's always hard to meet the needs of students who are all you know at different places I do think though that discussion models are very helpful for that with the right ground rules so it's a sense that we're reading and discussing together and sort of this is not a this doesn't have to be a deficit this can be a place where the learning happens right that that questions can get asked and and answered in a pure share or kind of way and also you know through critical reflection and engagement with the readings and through guided facilitation so this is a challenge but it is not necessarily a bad thing and then the other thing is that many students are not are only familiar with dominant narratives about incarceration policing and law that stem from carceral logic meaning you know I often have students who will enter the conversation with assumptions that well you know if you're but if if you're incarcerated it means you know you committed a crime and have to do the time and then like you know you did something bad and so you know reprogramming that to ask different questions and situate incarceration in ways that disrupts dominant narratives it is something that takes time it's not a one-shot thing this is where I think that the scaffolding these conversations and normalizing that across the curriculum has a lot of power for that that we can't introduce in many classes these ideas and conversations so that that knowledge can scaffold and the critical reflection can build it's wonderful to be able to have a class where students can go in depth on this topic but even if they can't or you know we want to reach students who aren't in that class or we want to reach students or give them things to think about throughout their educational experience so I think that understanding that this is where some students are entering the conversation also kind of bring this back to the importance of the lens of how we are introducing incarceration what information are we giving students so that they can you know challenge these assumptions and sort of address that in a way that is planned and scaffolded you know and supported throughout the rest of the learning experience and then lastly how do you make room for the possibility that students might be negatively impacted by incarceration well I certainly try to assume that they that students in the class probably are negatively impacted right so I try to apply strategies from trauma-informed pedagogy that can help create spaces where students have flexibility voice and choices for how they are going to engage in the conversation um leading with empathy you know listening not making assumptions about people's experiences can help create space for exploring potentially traumatic topics in a way that folks can get in on without already assuming you know where they stand and to do that though you have to establish clear boundaries in the class at the start in terms of and transparency and for how class is going to run and you know establish trust with all participants so that that's the work of the facilitator and the instructor in that so my goal is always working with the class to foster an atmosphere that respects individuals need for safety and respect to you know include the ability to make mistakes and learn from mistakes but also to um have conversations about you know what it means to be you know to be called in in a conversation what it means to take accountability for our own words our own feelings our own energy that we're bringing to the conversation to engage in critically reflective and listening practices right active listening practicing communication tools in different ways we can't assume that students have those skills coming to the classroom either so I think you know as we're again it becomes an opportunity to to lead by doing right practicing kind of trauma informed approaches helps them practice those same approaches that might be also useful to taking into their library of practice or professional space of practice um and working you know again with um with communities who may have experienced racial trauma or incarceration or other you know other forms of um of trauma in their lives so you know it becomes a a tool that we both employ and learn together okay so um my final thought is just that actively scaffolding learning about incarceration is critical for preparing LIS professionals to better meet informational needs of incarcerated informally incarcerated people and also for creating safe welcoming spaces in our libraries and in society that actively reject carceral logics in favor of community building empathy and social justice thank you so much please feel free to reach out if you want to be in touch or continue this conversation thanks