Evidences, Implications, and Critical Interrogations of Neoliberalism in Information Studies
Guest Editors: Marika Cifor and Jamie A. Lee
Neoliberalism, as economic doctrine, as political practice, and even as a "governing rationality" of contemporary life and work, increasingly encroaches on the Library and Information Studies field. The shift towards more conscious grappling with social justice and human rights debates and concerns has led to LIS scholarship that opens the possibility for addressing neoliberalism and the visible and often hidden roles it plays.
Simultaneously practitioners and scholars across LIS regularly face the material realities of such delimiting neoliberal encroachments through continued and largely unquestioned practices that continue to uphold inequities. Despite its far-reaching impact, neoliberalism has yet to be substantively addressed in LIS. This special issue will provide a much-needed transnational forum to critically engage the genealogical threads that constitute the LIS field by interrogating the discursive and material evidences and implications of neoliberalism.
Through its myriad definitions and instantiations throughout Information Studies and its associated domains (including archives, libraries, information policy, digital humanities, communication, media studies) and critical theory more broadly, this special issue will offer new ways to think about praxis as both practice and theory critically inform one another. Addressing neoliberalism provides a vital forum for international scholars and practitioners to come together to explore cross-cutting issues, such as: human rights frameworks as situated locally and globally, economic (in)justices, postcoloniality, decolonization, agency, access, ethics, Nation-State identities and citizenship, and belonging.
The scope of this issue might include research on:
- Increasing challenges to information ethics;
- Shifting practices among community and institutional information environments;
- The use of private contractors in government archives and public libraries;
- The entanglement of governmental and educational institutions, libraries and neoliberal policies, worldviews, and values;
- Information's relationship to the economic market/political economy of information more broadly;
- Neoliberal conceptions of information and knowledge;
- Intellectual and affective labor in contemporary LIS environments;
- Libraries and archives as sites of resistance;
- The prevalence of neoliberal discourse in LIS research;
- The influence of neoliberalism on labor practices in libraries, archives, museums or other information centers; and
- Economic inequalities and global justice.
Deadline for Submission: April 30, 2018
Types of Submissions
JCLIS welcomes the following types of submissions:
- Research Articles (no more than 7,000 words)
- Perspective Essays (no more than 5,000 words)
- Literature Reviews (no more than 7,000 words)
- Interviews (no more than 5,000 words)
- Book or Exhibition Reviews (no more than 1,200 words)
Research articles and literature reviews are subject to peer review by two referees. Perspective essays are subject to peer review by one referee. Interviews and book or exhibition reviews are subject to review by the issue editor(s).
Contacts
- Jamie A. Lee, University of Arizona: jalee2@email.arizona.edu
- Marika Cifor, Bowdoin College: mcifor@bowdoin.edu
Submission Guidelines for Authors
The Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies welcomes submissions from senior and junior faculty, students, activists, and practitioners working in areas of research and practice at the intersection of critical theory and library and information studies.
Authors retain the copyright to material they publish in the JCLIS, but the Journal cannot re-publish material that has previously been published elsewhere. The journal also cannot accept manuscripts that have been simultaneously submitted to another outlet for possible publication.
Citation Style
JCLIS uses the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition as the official citation style for manuscripts published by the journal. All manuscripts should employ the Notes and Bibliography style (as footnotes with a bibliography), and should conform to the guidelines as described in the Manual.
Submission Process
Manuscripts are to be submitted through JCLIS' online submission system (http://libraryjuicepress.com/journals/index.php/jclis) by April 30th, 2018. This online submission process requires that manuscripts be submitted in separate stages in order to ensure the anonymity of the review process and to enable appropriate formatting.
- Abstracts (500 words or less) should be submitted in plain text and should not include information identifying the author(s) or their institutional affiliations. With the exception of book reviews, an abstract must accompany all manuscript submissions before they are reviewed for publication.
- The main text of the manuscript must be submitted as a stand-alone file (in Microsoft Word or RTF)) without a title page, abstract, page numbers, or other headers or footers. The title, abstract, and author information should be submitted through the submission platform.
