Interest Convergence, Intersectionality, and Counter-Storytelling: Critical Race Theory as Practi…

Interest Convergence, Intersectionality, and Counter-Storytelling: Critical Race Theory as Practice in Scholarly Communications Librarianship

In Brief:
Despite the ever-increasing presence of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) rhetoric in librarianship, library workers who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) are still underrepresented and marginalized. Critical race theory (CRT) offers the tools necessary to understand why the underlying racial power dynamics of our profession remain unchanged and to generate new ideas to move toward true equity and inclusion. This article presents applications of the theoretical frameworks of interest convergence, intersectionality, and counter-storytelling to the authors’ work with users and to our collegial relationships. As scholarly communications and information policy specialists of color at a predominantly white academic library, these three frameworks inform how we teach about scholarly practices, such as copyright and citation, as well as how we analyze and educate about the open access landscape. We also argue that a critical race theory lens can provide useful analytical tools to inform practice in other types of libraries and different kinds of library work, and encourage all library workers to engage with it as they seek meaningful change in their work settings and the profession more broadly.
By
Maria Mejia
and
Anastasia Chiu
Introduction
As scholarly communications practitioners of color located in an academic library of a predominantly white
[1]
institution (PWI), we find that critical race theory serves as a cornerstone for how we relate to each other and to the profession. Multiple theoretical frameworks in this movement give name and shape to our approaches and to the racialized phenomena that we seek to resist. The themes of counter-storytelling, intersectionality, and a problematized approach to interest convergence speak most closely to the ways in which we practice CRT in our relationships and our work. We are members of a department consisting entirely of librarians who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color—a somewhat uncommon occurrence in our PWI and in librarianship more broadly—and this dynamic has shaped our CRT-informed practice. Collectively, as a department, we seek to set our own terms around what it means to be a good library worker and a good colleague. We work together to advocate for communities that are systematically excluded in scholarship and librarianship because our librarianship is for those communities. Yet, we must also contend with the fact that our institution’s support for this work is mainly a matter of interest convergence. To paraphrase Derrick Bell (1980), PWIs value and promote racial progress and racial justice work only insofar as it serves their political interest to do so. In our case, our institution benefits from the optics of our intersectionality as a woman and a non-binary person of color, taking on the labor of b…