Conference Agenda

Professor Jenna Hartel loves to survey the landscape of ideas in Library and Information Science. To that end, over her career, she has employed metaphors, performance, and multimedia to take students, educators, scholars, and practitioners to new places of understanding in our field. Jenna will bring this same adventurous spirit to her invited talk at the 2023 European Conference on Information Literacy. This time, she guides the audience across a recently surfaced and linked island chain of ideas that extend from the Library and Information Science mainland. The trip explores information experience, embodiment, contemplative practice, a multispecies perspective, and one additional (surprise!) destination. In an accessible manner, each conceptual islet will be defined simply, placed into historical context, and then related to research, pedagogy, and practice in Library and Information Science. Professor Hartel’s goal is to give all attendees an intriguing set of potentially uncharted notions to enliven conference conversations. There will be many souvenirs to take home! An avid video-maker and creator of the YouTube channel, INFIDEOS, the presentation will include a few original multimedia snippets on these topics.

Sociocultural approaches to information literacy, which recognise that information literacy is shaped through dialogue and debate, have not always been welcomed within our field, being variously critiqued as ‘fashionable,’ of no interest to practitioners or as irrelevant given the availability of other conceptual work. Yet, it could be argued that these ideas have irrevocably changed the direction of information literacy research and practice, not least by challenging ingrained assumptions about ways of knowing- and how we teach for these ideas. This keynote presentation critically analyses the legacy of information literacy’s sociocultural turn by reflecting on how these ideas have been developed since the early 2000s, how they have been integrated into information literacy discourse and narratives and their contributions to information literacy research and practice. In further examining gaps and silences, or the places where sociocultural ideas are sidelined, this presentation also reflects on future challenges for both research and practice, including the risk of stagnation, the lure of aspiration and the responsibilities of progress. In effect, where have sociocultural approaches to information literacy been, where might they be going and why does it matter to our field?