 Okay, and now we are going to get started. We are officially being recorded. So once again, this presentation is over who has access to information and why they have that access. And now we're going to introduce ourselves. So I'm Brittany Norwood. My pronouns are she, hers, her, and I'm a commons librarian. So you'll often see me at the public services desk on Thursdays and Fridays. And I also help out a lot with research assistants. And my email is listed down below. Hi, everybody. My name is Amber Sewell. I also use she, her, hers pronouns and the teaching and learning librarian at Hodges. So I teach a lot but also come up with fun new ways to deliver instruction. My email is on here as well. Please feel free to shoot either of us an email if you have any questions after today. Okay. And now for the details about this presentation. So for our first 30 minutes, we're going to be exploring the concept of information privilege. And we're going to give you all some resources that you can use to go more in depth to explore yourself. The last 30 minutes, it's going to be reserved for question and answers. And that portion of the meeting will not be recorded. So here are our objectives for today's session. So first, by the end of the session, we want you to be able to have a better understanding of what privilege is. We then want you to better understand what information privilege is and what some of its intersectionalities are. And finally, we're hoping that you're going to be able to know where to go to learn more about this topic. So before we dive in, I'm going to launch a quick poll. We'd just like to know if you've encountered the term information privilege before. Obviously, no right or wrong answers. Got a couple of no's. Awesome. Thank you for joining us and being interested in what is in a phrase that I don't really like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to information privilege. Awesome. We have a couple who have, but most haven't. Awesome. I've never used the poll feature before. This is fun. All right. So we will go ahead and get started. But before we can dive into a conversation about what information privilege is, I thought it would be good to go ahead and define what privilege is more generally. So Charbooth has this great definition that a colleague shared with me that privilege are the advantages, opportunities, rights, and affordances granted by status and positionality via class, race, gender, culture, sexuality, occupation, institutional affiliation, and political perspective. Now that is a lot of nouns to throw at you all at once. The Oxford English dictionary to summarize their definition describes it as a right or advantage that is given to an individual or group of individuals that has denied others. And so they mention wealth, education, standard of living. And so I think it's really important to acknowledge that when we're talking about privilege, these are things that definitely affect individuals, but are largely systemic issues. So we're looking at what does our society value and how are those enforced by our structures and our institutions? That's what we're really looking at the big picture of privilege here. And I think one thing that comes up often when we talk about privilege is it can be a little touchy sometimes. And because we are talking about really personal problems or personal things, people tend to think that if you acknowledge the privileges that you experience that is dismissing any struggles that you've gone through that your own effort that you've put into your endeavors. And Jenea Khan has this great quote where they say privilege isn't about what you've gone through, it's about what you haven't had to go through. And I think this is a really good way to demonstrate that when we talk about privilege, we're talking about like big societal picture that affects individuals. Now this is all great, but it might be a little abstract if this is the first time you're really digging into what privilege means. And so I have a really quick exercise in how to kind of examine what privilege actually looks like. So this is a privilege checklist. I came up with these on my own, but in the additional resources slide, I've got a short BuzzFeed article that has a diverse group going through this exercise. And there's also an ASU privilege checklist where you can go through more general privilege statements, but also specific privileges. So what we'll do is I've got a list of statements here. We'll go through the first one together. And then you listen to the statement and you see whether or not you agree with it. Does it apply to you? And your response and the phrasing of the statement kind of reveals what kind of privileges either you can benefit or you benefit from or that is being denied to you. So the first one I've got is when I walk into a room, most people look like me. And I can say, yes, the statement does apply to me and this is for a variety of reasons. When I walk into a room, most of the people are going to be white. I work in a library, which has a lot of women there. So I can generally expect that the gender presentation is going to be largely female. I can assume everybody there is educated. And for the most part, everybody is able-bodied. Now, all of those things are not true for everybody. And so some people are denied some of the privileges that I experience walking into a room. Others, like if I were a white man, would have more privilege. And so as you're thinking about these statements, just kind of reflect on whether the statement applies to you and what that says about the privileges that you benefit from and where that positions you in relations to others in society. So I've never been sexually harassed. If I show physical affection for my partner in public, I don't fear harassment or abuse. I've never had to worry about where to sleep at night. I've never gone to bed hungry. I've never had to look up a place online before visiting to make sure I can navigate the space. I've always been able to do my homework at home. I can trace my family history back decades, maybe even centuries. And the holidays I celebrate are usually nationally recognized, so I don't have to ask for those off. And so looking at this list, there are a couple of things that I want to highlight. The first is that none of us have responded to this list in the same way. All of us have varying degrees of privilege. And so that's going to reflect on how we've responded to these statements and have they resonate with us. The second thing I want to talk or highlight is that some of these are things that like even a couple of years ago, I wouldn't have been able to recognize as privilege, like not until the last couple of years would I have ever walked through a space and thought about my physical body in a space and how I can navigate space. Like if I were in a wheelchair, if I were in a larger body, like things would look different for me. And that is a layer of privilege. Or you know, if you have ancestors who were taken from Africa and brought to America and enslaved, you may not be able to trace your family history back decades. And I would not have considered that a privilege until I reframed it and realized that not everybody could do that. And thirdly, I want to point out that all of these things while deeply personal, so like if you've experienced homelessness or food insecurity, those are all very personal. The root causes are largely systemic factors. So these are things that we don't have a whole lot of control of. You don't have control over how society views your gender or your sexuality. So while these are all very deeply personal things, I think it's nice to be able to reflect that while we can all connect to these in some way, it also means that we can take a step back and really view these conversations from a larger angle, because it's not like we're being aspects of our personality or being attacked. All of these things have roots in systemic and institutional factors. So now that I've hit you with that heavy nonsense, I'm going to turn it over to Brittany to talk about information privilege. Okay, so that was a really great answer. Thank you for that. And so now some of you may be wondering how all of this information ties into information privilege and what this term even means. So what is information privilege? Once again, referring back to Char Booth, they say that the concept of information privilege situates information literacy in a sociocultural context of justice and access. And Booth goes into greater detail about this and her posts that I've linked up above. So if you are ever interested in looking more into her in-depth explanation of this, then you have access to it right there. But to very much simplify things, information privilege is at least in part who has accessed information and why they have that access. So let's talk now a little bit more about how information privilege can affect you as students. So I'm making a lot of faces of spider just like randomly descended from the ceiling of my laptop and I've lost track of it. But I'm going to ignore that I've got a spider running around in my lap to talk about some of the different factors that impact information privilege. So the first one we've got listed here is economic and geographic privilege. And often these are linked, but not always to put a personal spin on it. So one of the things on our checklist was I always able to do homework at home. And for me growing up, that wasn't true. That wasn't a privilege that I was able to enjoy. And that was largely due to these economic and geographic privileges. I grew up in a very rural area. So internet companies genuinely don't bring good internet access out that far. And that's still a problem today. Like my father is a Dean of Technology at a community college. And when people switched to remote work, he still had to make his hour commute because the internet access was so bad, which I find ironic the Dean of Technology doesn't have adequate technology to do his job. But that's the truth for a lot of people, especially a lot of people who come to UT. And there's also an economic factor tied in there. So not only was it rural area, but like one year our air conditioner unit went out and we couldn't afford to replace it. So that meant for a year, we didn't have heating or air, which made being able to function during the height of summer or winter very difficult. And so when you're experiencing physical discomfort or you don't feel safe, whether it is extreme temperatures or not being able to sleep or not having a safe place to sleep or being hungry, it's very difficult to be able to focus on school. In a different term, if you have ever tried to access an article without being logged in to your UT account, you may have seen where it wants you to pay $45 to read one article. That's a lot of money for some people. That could be like their grocery list or their groceries for a week. For others, they won't think twice about dropping $45 to read an article or sometimes looking at the price of textbooks. You may have scholarships to cover tuition, but the cost of textbooks alone can be a huge barrier for some people. And so those are just two things that can impact your access to information. Yeah. And just to build a little bit on this to give you guys some hard data. So according to the FCC, about 6% of the total population doesn't have access to Wi-Fi. That might not seem like a lot, 19 million people in the U.S., but when you look at that from a geographic area, 25% of people who live in rural areas, so 14.5 million people of that 19 million are without internet access. 33% of people who live in tribal areas also don't have this or at least don't have reliable internet access. So this means that a good portion of these populations are going to have a harder time getting access to this information or at least be able to do so reliably. So it may be the case that you live somewhere where you can, it's just an inconvenience when your Wi-Fi is out because it's normally working, but for a good portion of the population, that's not necessarily the case. And it should also be noted that about 100 million Americans don't subscribe to broadband. And the FCC didn't make clear whether or not this is solely focusing on people living with areas with access or if this is the total number. So that obviously can bring them to play the economic situation as well. If you can't afford to have broadband or Wi-Fi, then you're not going to subscribe to it. And once again, it's going to be harder to access the information that you need. Now going on into education, if we're building upon that previous example, it also shows that the more likely you are to have a family who has had some form of higher education, then the more likely your family is to have access to Wi-Fi. You're also maybe more likely to live in a suburban or certain urban areas. And these places are more likely to have reliable access. However, this number decreases a little less education, your family has had access to. So people who haven't graduated from high school are the least likely to have had access to this. And if you come from a family that is in this situation and you're a first-generation college student, then that could be very, very difficult on you, especially if you're having to do research for a class project while you're at home for break, something like that. Furthermore, in terms of education, families who have had these educational experiences are able to access a support system for these children, people going into the educational experience. And so students who come from these backgrounds are able to rely on their family members if they need to ask, hey, where can I go to get something that the library doesn't have? These family members may have already had access to ILS in the past, and so they're saying, could tell them a little bit more about the process. Or they could just say, hey, consider talking to somebody in the library. They'll always be willing to help you out. If you don't have this background though, then your family might not know how to help you out. And on top of that, you also are at risk for feeling like an imposter if you ask these questions. So as a first-generation college student myself, I know that I felt that the more questions I asked and more likely it felt like somebody is going to call me out and say, hey, you don't actually belong here if you don't know these things. That's obviously not the truth, but that comes with not coming from a family without these educational privileges. All right. So race, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, that is a lot to put on one line. So I'm just going to barely scratch the surface to get people thinking about how these might impact information privilege as well. So let's say, you know, first we'll talk about access, trying to get information. So if you are a young black man walking into a library or a museum asking for help to get research, the reaction is probably going to be different than if it were a young white man. Same if you are a man versus a woman versus somebody's transgender individual versus a non-binary individual like that's also going to cause different levels of interaction, same if you were not a white. I think a lot of these, it's good to point out, these are systemic barriers that are being acted out by individuals. And so that's going to impact how you access the information or how available it is to you. Same with sexuality, if we look at it from maybe the flip side. So let's say we have on one hand people who are trying to access information. We also have to look at the people who are producing it. So the researchers, the professors, the journalists, the news reporters, all of these factors are going to impact how able they are to access the resources they need to do the research and produce their content, but also whether or not they're given a voice. I took a class with some other graduate teaching assistants and a woman shared that the first day of her class a young man stood up and said, you're a lesbian. I'm not going to listen to anything you have to say. I'm dropping this class. And this was her first semester teaching. And so you can imagine that that would cause several different barriers. You have to continue that class knowing that a student has dismissed you not based on your professional experience, not based on your education, but based on your sexuality. I could definitely see how that would cause you to be hesitant or feel vulnerable every time you stood up in front of the class. On the other end of a student felt that comfortable voicing those ideas. This person also has gatekeepers for their career. So they have their own professors, they have the people who do job interviews and hire them and perform their annual reviews. They may also face the same barriers just in the opposite direction. So it's a hugely complex topic. And so I definitely recommend looking at those sources on the additional resources page to dive further into them. But it's also going to be complicated by Brittany's explanation of intersectionality. Yes. So in case I don't know how many of you are familiar with this term, but intersectionality is in part the way that your different identities come together to impact your lived experiences. So let's take, for example, economic geographic privilege and combine those with educational privilege. So say that you're someone who is from an area that doesn't have reliable access to Wi-Fi. You're from a lower income family and you're from a rural area and your family isn't highly educated. It could be the case that you're living, you're more likely to be living in an echo chamber that's harder for you to break out of. So it's not going to be as easy for you to get access to information outside of what the people directly surrounding you are saying. However, if you're somebody who say you still have some educational, your family isn't educationally privileged, but you live in a geographic area where you're at least able to go to a local library pretty reliably and look up information, you may be more likely to be able to look into different sources, find out what you believe, and to break that echo chamber a little bit. So intersectionality, once again, it comes into play by explaining how all these different aspects of your identity come together to impact what your situation looks like and ultimately what kind of information you are privileged to access. So now let's go into a little bit more about how information impacts you all as students. So first of all, let's talk about what sort of resources are available to you all as UTK students and also actually we have some faculty and staff members here and the audience as well. So first of all, you guys right now have access to a wealth of information. Not only do we subscribe to several different databases and journals, so on and so forth, have access to many different resources such as books, streaming videos, so on and so forth. That can help you look up a variety of topics from a variety of different perspectives, but you also currently have access to an interlibrary loan, which is useful for getting information that the library currently doesn't have, but that one of it, but then institute somewhere else might have access to. So right now, as a UTK affiliate, you do have access to a wealth of information. Now your other identities may make you feel uncomfortable reaching out to a librarian and asking for help, but as somebody who felt those feelings before, please know that we really are here to help you out. Any questions that you may have, they're not stupid questions, we're more than willing to help you out. And just because you weren't born with the knowledge of how to do something, that doesn't mean that you don't belong here. It just means that you didn't have the privilege of having somebody in your life who was able to tell you about it. So just now we're here to help you out. All right, following that lovely sentiment. One thing that I think some students don't realize, and this may seem very far off, whether you're graduating this December or you're graduating in a couple of years, time has no meaning anymore. But eventually, you do lose access to your UTK library resources that Brittany was just talking about, of course, as an alumni or visitor, you can always chat in with us. But six months after you graduate, you lose access to those online resources. We have had alumni, I know for some people, that won't matter. For others, we've had people chat in doing research for grad school, trying to prep for the GRE, working on news articles and stuff who remember, oh, JSTOR was a great resource, that would be really helpful. And then they chat in and we have to tell them that they no longer have access through UT. After you graduate, after that six month period has elapsed, you can always go to your public library. There are also great open access journals or publications that are being published now. And this ties into information privilege, because that information is still there, you've had access to it at one point. But due to our contracts with our vendors and our publishers, we can't offer that access after graduation. So it's just another very nuanced conversation that we would love to talk to you guys about later if you're interested. This is a lot of information to try to cover in a 30 minute workshop. We do have a librarian who teaches a semester long course on this, so we could definitely dive deeper into all of these topics. To help you if you're still interested in this, we've got a list of additional resources that go everywhere from Buzzfeed videos and TED talks to articles. I've got an Instagram video, different university resources. So if you are interested and would like to dig deeper into these topics, these are some of the recommended ones that we use to put this together. And this list will also be in the YouTube description when the video gets uploaded. And then I and Brittany can put our emails in the chat so you can always feel free to shoot us an email with any questions you have. It doesn't have to be related to any class or in. But we wanted to leave you guys with this because this is such a huge topic, and it's very important. We just had our 30 minutes. So with that, we would greatly appreciate it if you guys would fill out the survey, just a couple of quick questions about the workshop today. If you need proof of attendance, filling out that survey will get you that. We would also ask that you please join us next Wednesday at 2.30 for our very last workshop of the semester, where we're going to talk about bias and algorithms, another very deep topic. You can register for the workshop and also view past recordings of our previous workshops at this link here. So now we are going to go ahead and stop the recording and answer any questions you guys have.