by Jorge López-McKnight, Faculty, Library Services

On January 1, 2024, Texas Senate Bill 17 (SB 17) went into effect, legally prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices, teams, committees, or units and the work, programs, activities, and training/s (read: learning) that have traditionally been directed by those areas.

As a librarian that is not teaching faculty, and not in a department that offers credit courses or stand-alone modes of teaching and learning with students, SB 17 offered challenges, restrictions, and boundaries to what can be made for this learning experience. I offer this framing to highlight the tension, conflict, and reality of learning and creating under SB 17 in a faculty learning community (FLC) that centers both the interrogation of structures and formations of power through global politics and the disciplinary lens of gender and women studies, as well as being in a profession and discipline that has–and continues to–struggle with incorporating critical theoretical frameworks, pedagogies, and lenses.

This was the challenge, which was also an invitation.

Over the past academic year, I was fortunate enough to be learning from–and with–a wide range of generous and generative presentations that focused on global affairs and their relationship to issues and topics concerning gender, sexuality, and women. Additionally, being part of a small cohort that was in conversation and community, both around the presentation’s content as well as our own subject areas and pedagogical practices/strategies, offered another layer of learning that was happening concurrently which enriched the relationships and learning itself. There’s something special and tender about learning, sharing ideas and experiences around teaching, and being in the world with others who, perhaps, regard teaching and learning in a particular way. (So shout-out to my fellow cohort members.)

The project that materialized from this FLC experience was a two-week unit titled, Libraries: Power, Knowledge, and Politics, that will (hopefully) be part of a credit course that’s offered through the INDS department. The overall focus of the unit is to explore and analyze the themes and categories of women, gender, and global and the relationships and connections of those themes and categories to power, knowledge, and politics of libraries as social institutions. Through critical readings that center the knowledge of women of color, women, and queer, trans, and non-binary people; meaningful activities and engaging learning experiences that include interviews, tracing and archiving the keywords of gender, global, and women in the learning materials as well as in their own information worlds; the hope is that students will develop a deeper, critical analysis and understanding of the library as well as a sense of interests and participation in the library’s role and position in localized and global contexts.

The library is a unique social institution in that it is not confined to just schooling, a neighborhood, an industry, or prisons. In that way it can be an active part of, and a presence in, one’s entire lifespan that contributes to structuring and facilitating social/knowledge relations. And, perhaps, to realize the library’s potentialities and possibilities there needs to be more serious, critical, and rigorous conceptualization and analytical precision of it.

This remains a challenge and also an invitation.

About Jorge

Jorge López-McKnight, a former community college student, has been working at ACC’s Riverside Library since October 2018. He’s a Sagittarius.