Engaging Conversations: Foregrounding Twitter Feeds in Library Guides As a Way to Critically Promote Discussions of Social Justice

Academic librarians have often been hesitant to foreground real time engagement with social justice in our public facing library guides. The guides, more often than not, serve merely to provide access points to “academic” materials and traditional news sources. Perhaps there is a different path. Driven by the events of the past year (though these issues are not new), I have been working on ways to point patrons towards the real conversations happening outside (and sometimes inside) academia that are missed when we rely on traditional news sources. The real critical engagement with social justice issues such as race and technology, or migrant justice, is happening right in front of our eyes on Twitter. In this short talk, I highlight how adding Twitter feeds to LibGuides can be part of a larger program to engage library’s (and our students) in critical race theory and the foregrounding of traditionally marginalized voices.