Cultivating Counterspace: Building a Community of Practice
Event Type
Presentation
Start Date
25-7-2025 2:40 PM
End Date
25-7-2025 3:10 PM
Description
Where dominant narratives often silence or tokenize marginalized voices, creating intentional counterspaces for people of color (POC) in Library and Information Science is essential. As the program manager of a graduate-level, DEI-focused LIS pathway, I have witnessed firsthand the transformative power of a community of practice rooted in trust, shared identity, and collective care. This session will explore how the Knowledge River model serves as a vital counterspace for emerging POC information professionals to reflect, explore, commiserate, and experiment together.
Our community of practice offers structured-yet-fluid opportunities for graduate students, most of whom identify as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+, to engage in co-mentorship, critical dialogue, and collaborative praxis. Through regular cohort meetings, reflective journaling, peer-led workshops, and alumni circles, participants are empowered to interrogate the systemic challenges of the profession while co-creating liberatory visions for the future of LIS.
This session will share insights from our evolving practice, highlighting the ways this space allows participants to navigate grief, celebrate joy, and challenge epistemic injustice—all while preparing to enter a field that doesn’t always reflect our values or identities. We will also discuss the tensions that arise within these spaces, and how embracing vulnerability and imperfection is part of the process of authentic community-building.
Attendees will leave with a framework for cultivating their own community of practice, whether within formal programs or grassroots networks, that centers people of color and prioritizes collective growth. In line with the POCinLIS mission, this session invites us to imagine what’s possible when we build with each other, for each other, in the face of systemic and social precarity.
Outcomes
- Attitude: Attendees will leave with a framework for cultivating their own community of practice, whether within formal programs or grassroots networks, that centers people of color and prioritizes collective growth.
- Cognitive strategy: Attendees will some away with strategies to think, organize, learn and behave.
Cultivating Counterspace: Building a Community of Practice
Where dominant narratives often silence or tokenize marginalized voices, creating intentional counterspaces for people of color (POC) in Library and Information Science is essential. As the program manager of a graduate-level, DEI-focused LIS pathway, I have witnessed firsthand the transformative power of a community of practice rooted in trust, shared identity, and collective care. This session will explore how the Knowledge River model serves as a vital counterspace for emerging POC information professionals to reflect, explore, commiserate, and experiment together.
Our community of practice offers structured-yet-fluid opportunities for graduate students, most of whom identify as BIPOC and/or LGBTQIA+, to engage in co-mentorship, critical dialogue, and collaborative praxis. Through regular cohort meetings, reflective journaling, peer-led workshops, and alumni circles, participants are empowered to interrogate the systemic challenges of the profession while co-creating liberatory visions for the future of LIS.
This session will share insights from our evolving practice, highlighting the ways this space allows participants to navigate grief, celebrate joy, and challenge epistemic injustice—all while preparing to enter a field that doesn’t always reflect our values or identities. We will also discuss the tensions that arise within these spaces, and how embracing vulnerability and imperfection is part of the process of authentic community-building.
Attendees will leave with a framework for cultivating their own community of practice, whether within formal programs or grassroots networks, that centers people of color and prioritizes collective growth. In line with the POCinLIS mission, this session invites us to imagine what’s possible when we build with each other, for each other, in the face of systemic and social precarity.
Outcomes
- Attitude: Attendees will leave with a framework for cultivating their own community of practice, whether within formal programs or grassroots networks, that centers people of color and prioritizes collective growth.
- Cognitive strategy: Attendees will some away with strategies to think, organize, learn and behave.
