P21. Knowing Institutions or Knowing Co-Citizens: Two Understandings of Information Literacy and Citizenship

Background: Bernard Manin’s horizontal and Andrew Kuper’s vertical models of citizenship exemplify two prominent understandings of citizenship that incorporate access to and mediation of information. By bringing information’s role in citizenship into focus, both models imply that citizens must be information literate in order to practice good citizenship. Without such literacy, citizens are limited in their ability to engage in informed democratic participation. The difference between the models, however, changes the required nature of citizens’ information literacy. The 2003, 2005, and 2014 declarations on information literacy provide the guiding framework for international recommendations. Each links information literacy with good citizenship. Yet with each new statement, the rhetoric surrounding this link shifts in noticeable ways. Methods: The poster maps the rhetoric of the three international statements on information literacy and a UNESCO information literacy primer onto Manin’s and Kuper’s models. Results: The picture that emerges is a gradual shift within information literacy concerning models of citizenship. Discussion & Conclusion: The comparison indicates a pattern of the horizontal model’s displacement by the vertical model in information literacy rhetoric. This previously unexamined pattern raises further questions about the connections between citizenship and information literacy and about the nature of information literacy itself. Interdisciplinary Reflection: The study of information literacy is typically library-centric, but this poster demonstrates wider social implications and influences. At the same time, the poster indicates that citizenship theory can benefit from a Library and Information Science (LIS) perspective