Opening and Closing Keynotes

Opening Keynote*
David James Hudson
Wednesday, May 17, 2023 | 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm EST

View David Hudson’s Opening Keynote HERE / Opening Slides / PDF Version

Closing Keynote**
Emily Drabinski in conversation with 
Baharak Yousefi and David James Hudson
Friday, May 19, 2023 | 2:30pm EST – 4:00pm EST

Closing Slides / Resources & Links


David James Hudson is an award-winning writer, a library and information studies scholar, and an associate librarian at University of Guelph.  His creative and scholarly work is primarily concerned with race, racism, and anti-racism, especially with the ways in which these phenomena have come to be conceptualized (both historically and in the present day) and the interests such conceptualizations have served. He explores such questions with particular attention to contexts of library and information work, Black diasporic life, colonialism, and capitalism. His writing has appeared in such publications as up//root*, Journal of Critical Library and Information StudiesJournal of Information Ethics, and the edited collections Topographies of Whiteness and Information Ethics and Global Citizenship. Information about these and other works can be found at his website, www.davidjameshudson.ca.

Baharak Yousefi grew up in Shiraz, immigrated to Vancouver as a refugee, and lives by the Salish Sea. Baharak is a librarian at Simon Fraser University and a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography at SFU. She is co-editor of Feminists Among Us: Resistance and Advocacy in Library Leadership, which won the 2018 Association of College and Research Libraries Award for Significant Achievement in Women and Gender Studies Librarianship. Baharak is interested in libraries as sites of study, solidarity, and struggle. 

Emily Drabinski is Critical Pedagogy Librarian at the Graduate Center, City University of New York and the President-Elect of the American Library Association. She has published and presented widely on topics related to critical  information literacy, queer theory and knowledge organization, and the importance of organized labor and collective struggle. Drabinski edits Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, a book series from Library Juice Press/Litwin Books. Learn more about Emily Drabinski from her website: https://www.emilydrabinski.com/

*[Opening keynote will be recorded live.]

**[Closing keynote will not be recorded.]