Knowledge Organization in a Dangerous Time
Julia Bullard, Melissa Adler, Stacy Allison-Cassin, Sharon Farnel, Ali Shiri
Hybrid, PanelsAbstract
Knowledge organization (KO) work is both critical and risky in the context of rising fascism, creating tools that support both discovery and censorship. Contemporary approaches require knowing how our design work contributes to either outcome. In this panel, we will apply our collective expertise in critique and design of knowledge organization to explore ethical approaches to KO work in dangerous times.
Date
May 28, 2025 10:30 ADT — 11:45 ADT
Location
Rowe 1007 and Zoom
School of Information, The University of British Colombia
Julia Bullard is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information, where teaches information organization, metadata, and radical information work. Her research examines how metadata and vocabulary design (mis)represents communities and their materials. Her current projects focus on how community organizations create and sustain their own specialized vocabularies. She serves on the board of the Canadian Association for Information Science and the Subject Analysis and Access standing committee of International Federation of Library Associations.
Faculty of Information & Media Studies, Western University
Melissa Adler is an Associate Professor and Graduate Chair in the Faculty of Information & Media Studies at Western University. Her research examines knowledge organization and state power and the paradoxes inherent to facilitating access to information. Her book, Cruising the Library examines the history of sexuality through the lens of Library of Congress classifications. She has two books on Thomas Jefferson and the history of information due to be published in the coming year: Peculiar Satisfaction: Thomas Jefferson and the Mastery of Subjects and Surveillance and Security in the “Empire of Liberty”.
Department of Information Science, Dalhousie University
Stacy Allison-Cassin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Information Science at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, Stacy engages in research related to linked data, and metadata and issues related to equity and justice. Stacy is the co-lead of the Respectful Terminology Platform Project and is currently the chair for the Teaching and Learning community and a member of council of the National Indigenous Knowledge and Language Association, and Indigenous-led association centered in Canada and sits several advisory bodies. A Citizen of the Métis Nation of Ontario, Stacy has with kinship connections to the Georgian Bay Métis community.
University of Alberta Library
Sharon Farnel (MLIS, PhD) is a settler who lives and works in Amiskwacîwâskahikan, also known as Edmonton, located in Treaty 6 and Metis Territory. She is Head, Metadata Strategies at the University of Alberta Library, and since 2014 has been working with collaborators in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region on community-driven knowledge organization and resource description for their digital library. Her professional, research, and teaching focus on community-driven knowledge organization, reparative descriptive standards and practices, and linked and open metadata.
School of Library and Information studies, University of Alberta
Ali Shiri is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and is currently the Vice Dean of the Faculty of Graduate & Postdoctoral Studies. He received his PhD in Information Science from the University of Strathclyde Department of Computer and Information Sciences in Glasgow, Scotland. Ali has been teaching, researching, and writing about digital repositories, digital information interaction, data and learning analytics, and more recently on the generative AI implications and ethics in higher education and research. In his current research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), he is developing mobile applications for cultural heritage digital libraries and digital storytelling systems for the Inuvialuit communities in the Northwest Territories in Canada’s Western Arctic.