The IRDL Scholars Speaker Series is designed to shine a spotlight on voices and ideas that challenge traditional ways of conducting research. It surveys various topics, including specific research methods and critiques of processes associated with western social science approaches, with the intention of inspiring research explicitly rooted in social justice. As librarians, educators, and researchers, we welcome this opportunity to reflect and incorporate what we learn from these speakers into our own research efforts, so that our methodologies integrate anti-racist and anti-colonial practices.
The series is coordinated by a working group of IRDL Scholars. Each speaker session is free to attend via Zoom; anyone interested is welcome. Please see below for the speakers and the dates of their presentations, to register. The hashtag for the events will be #IRDLSpeakers.
This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services RE-250170-OLS-21.
Link to the 2021 IRDL Scholars’ Speaker Series
Link to the 2022 IRDL Scholars' Speaker Series
Link to the 2023 IRDL Scholars' Speaker Series
The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
February 5, 2025 9:00 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. PST
This session is moderated by Courtney Block and Frans Albarillo
Alex Hanna
Is artificial intelligence going to take over the world? Have big tech scientists created an artificial lifeform that can think on its own? Is it going to put authors, artists, and others out of business? Are we about to enter an age where computers are better than humans at everything?
The answer to these questions, we respond: is “no,” “they wish,” “LOL,” and “definitely not.” This kind of thinking is a symptom of a phenomenon known as “AI hype.” Hype looks and smells fishy: It twists words and helps the rich get richer by justifying data theft, motivating surveillance capitalism, and devaluing human creativity in order to replace meaningful work with jobs that treat people like machines. In this talk, I discuss our book The AI Con, (coauthored with Dr. Emily M. Bender), which offers a sharp, witty, and wide-ranging take-down of AI hype across its many forms. We show you how to spot AI hype, how to deconstruct it, and how to expose the power grabs it aims to hide. Armed with these tools, you will be prepared to push back against AI hype at work, as a consumer in the marketplace, as a skeptical newsreader, and as a citizen holding policymakers to account. Together, we expose AI hype for what it is: a mask for Big Tech’s drive for profit, with little concern for who it affects.
Asking, We Walk
February 13, 2025 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. PST
This session is moderated by Mandy Choie and Paige Chant
Baharak Yousefi
In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, historian Robin D. G. Kelley documents the work of radical Black artists, movement activists, and intellectuals in the twentieth century. As the title suggests, Kelley’s exploration of the hopes, desires, and visions of the individuals and groups—their freedom dreams—is the organizing frame and the central story of the book. While reading the book, I was struck by Kelley’s analysis of why certain revolutionary movements were unable to build and mobilize a strong base in their home communities. Kelley argues that the “...activists were so concerned with self-defense and on how to win militarily that they devoted little time and energy to the most fundamental question of all: what kind of world they wanted to build if they did win” (2002, 108). This question marked a turning point in my thinking about libraries and the conceptualization of my central research question in my doctoral work: what kind of library would we want to build if we did win? Much of my work and study, up to this point, has been about opposition. With libraries and the public’s access to them at stake, a retreat from fighting is neither prudent nor practical, but alongside the continued struggle, we must also imagine. “What kind of library would we want to build if we did win?” is the hopeful interrogatory at the heart of my research. And it is the question that led me to the library workers whose current work—grounded in justice, freedom, solidarity, beauty, community—can, I believe, contribute to the expansion of our political imaginations in libraries.
Learning from Students: How Longitudinal Mixed-Methods Research Can Change What We “Know”
February 24, 2025 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. PST
This session is moderated by Claire Nickerson and Ashley Wilson
Sara Goldrick-Rab
Nearly 1 in 2 college students starts college but does not finish. Colleges and universities are full of professionals with opinions about why. This session will share what happened when researchers engaged in longitudinal mixed-methods research to examine this challenge among a group of 3,000 low-income students. We’ll think together about how iterative and multi-facted data collection can facilitate the acquisition of new knowledge, test emerging hypotheses, and lead to new conclusions.
Information Literacy as Social Practice: A Theoretical and Methodological Discussion
March 25, 2025 9 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. PST
This session is moderated by Brynne Campbell Rice and Rebecca Orozco
Annemaree Lloyd
In this presentation the practice of information literacy will be interrogated through a practical theoretical lens. The theory of Information literacy and information literacy landscapes will be explored and the methodological implications of this approach discussed.