iSchool Assistant Professor Dr. Beth Patin is a keynote speaker for the 49th annual Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS) virtual conference.
The conference’s 2021 theme, “Northern Relations: Connecting to the Unexpected and Overlooked to Information Science,” invites participants to explore how library and information science can offer diverse and inclusive perspectives. The theme perfectly ties into Dr. Patin’s research on epistemicide, which is the silencing, killing, or devaluing of knowledge systems.
In her session, “Unexpected and overlooked: Understanding epistemicide in information science,” Dr. Patin will argue for a paradigm shift in information science and explore how knowledge systems, practices, and transformative methodologies traditionally get excluded from the field.
“My epistemicide work stems from my personal experiences of having my ways of knowing devalued and silenced within information science, and academia more broadly,” says Dr. Patin. “We currently have three published works on this topic, and it’s most exciting to see other people connect with the injustices we point out in our work. I hope this work will continue to help scholars and librarians identify injustices in their own intellectual pursuits. I believe by naming these injustices, we can start to work toward addressing them.”
Dr. Patin wants attendees to understand how epistemicide affects current scholars and future informational professionals. “When people face epistemic injustices, these experiences continue to harm us repeatedly and even have the potential to harm the next generation of scholars as well,” says Dr. Patin. “I also hope the audience will take away concrete steps we must collectively take if we are going to address epistemicide as a field and within academia.”
In addition to her research on epistemicide, Dr. Patin is also working on projects around critical community resilience, as well as digital humanities and the Civil Rights Movement. She is the co-founder of the Library Information Investigative Team research group, is a recipient of the Meredith Teaching Award for Early Excellence, was named an American Library Association Emerging Leader, and is a member of the Advisory Board on the Laura Bush Foundation for America’s Libraries.
The conference runs from Monday, June 7 to Friday, June 11, and is open for all to attend virtually. Dr. Patin’s keynote is Jun 7, 2021 2:30 pm — 4:00 pm EST. To view the full schedule and attend the conference, visit the official CAIS2021 website at cais2021.com.
