Introduction to Library Trends 64 (4) Spring 2016: Reconfiguring Race, Gender, and Sexuality

In October 2014, more than a hundred scholars, practitioners, and activists gathered at the University of Toronto to discuss the ways that race, gender, sexuality, and their intersections with other identity-constituting discourses shape the ways in which information is produced, organized, and preserved, particularly in libraries and archives. Organized by the independent publisher Library Juice Press/Litwin Books and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, the Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies Colloquium (GSISC) emerged in part from the publication of the Feminist and Queer Information Studies Reader (2013), edited by Patrick Keilty and Rebecca Dean as part of the Press’s Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies series. Their volume brought established and emerging scholars in library and information studies (LIS) together with scholars from other fields that share a commitment to critical race theory, feminism, and queer theory. Pairing scholarship by Hope Olson and D. Grant Campbell with that of Dean Spade, Chela Sandoval, Judith Halberstam, and Ann Cvetkovich, Keilty and Dean’s volume positioned race, gender, and sexuality as central to the project of information studies, and information and technology as central to race, gender, and sexuality studies. The GSISC attempted to do the same