Monthly Archives: December 2018

CAPAL/ACBAP Annual Meeting – June 2 -4, 2019 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2019

University of British Columbia

Vancouver, British Columbia

The Canadian Association of Professional Academic Librarians (CAPAL) invites you to participate in its annual conference, to be held as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences 2019 at the University of British Columbia on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam) people. This conference offers librarians and allied professionals across all disciplines an alternative space to share research and scholarship, challenge current thinking about professional issues, and forge new relationships.

Theme

In keeping with the Congress 2019 theme, Circles of Conversation, the theme of CAPAL19 is Politics of Conversation: Identity, Community, and Communication.

 This conference provides an opportunity for the academic library community to critically examine and discuss the ways in which our profession is influenced by its social, political, and economic environments. By considering academic librarianship within its historical contexts, its presents, and its possible futures, and by situating it within evolving cultural frameworks and structures of power, we can better understand the ways in which academic librarianship may reflect, reinforce, or challenge these contexts both positively and negatively.

In what kinds of conversation are we or are we not engaging within the profession, academia, and civil society? How are the various identities that constitute our communities reflected (or not) within academic librarianship, and how do we engage in conversations within our own communities and with communities that we may see as external.

Potential Topics:

Papers presented might relate to aspects of the following themes (though they need not be limited to them):

·       Diversity: how do we ensure our circles (communities, spaces) are diverse? What are the circles available to librarians, and how do we ensure that librarians are not circumscribed by their identities within these circles? This could apply both to academic vs. public librarianship, or academic librarian vs. the broader academic community, but perhaps more importantly, it could ask these questions with respect to women, people of colour, and Indigenous librarians.

·       Intellectual and academic freedom: How do we define our responsibilities and our liberties in these areas? Are these positive or negative freedoms, especially with respect to broader communities?

·         “Imagined Communities”: It is the 35th anniversary of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. How do librarians see themselves in various “imagined communities” (nationality, community of practice, inter- and cross-disciplinary), and what are the politics of our participation?

·       Conversations outside the circles: how do we make our research relevant outside LIS? Is this different for different kinds of research? How do we bring public values and ideas into our work and research?

·       Labour and solidarity: how to we organize ourselves within academic librarianship; how do we connect our conversations with other library workers, other academic workers, other workers as a whole.

·       Conversations within practice/praxis: how are communications and connections established and maintained with the profession and between academic librarians and administrators, faculty, students, and other researchers.

The Program Committee invites proposals for individual papers as well as proposals for panel submissions of three papers. Proposed papers must be original and not have been published elsewhere.

·       Individual papers are typically 20 minutes in length. For individual papers, please submit an abstract of no more than 400 words and a presentation title, with a brief biographical statement and your contact information.

·         For complete panels, please submit a panel abstract of no more than 400 words as well as a list of all participants and brief biographical statements, and a separate abstract of no more than 400 words for each presenter. Please identify and provide participants’ contact information for the panel organizer.

Please feel free to contact the Program Committee to discuss a topic for a paper, panel, or other session format. Proposals should be emailed as an attachment in your preferred format (open formats welcome!), using the following filename convention:

 Lastname_Title.<extension>

Proposals and questions should be directed to the Program Chair, Sam Popowich at

Sam.Popowich [at] ualberta.ca

Deadline for Proposals is: 21/12/2018

Further information about the conference, as well as Congress 2019 more broadly, will be available soon.