Throughout the year, SRRT offers a variety of events and programs to educate, connect, and maintain forward momentum in our work to make ALA more democratic and to establish progressive priorities not only for the Association, but also for the entire library profession.
Upcoming Events & Programs
Check back later!
Past Events & Programs
Dialogue With Peace Activists From Palestine & Israel
Date & Time: Sunday April 7, 2024 at 2 PM Eastern Time. Online via Zoom.
A dialogue with Osama Iliwat and Iris Gur, activist organizers-educators from the binational Palestinian and Israeli organization, Combatants for Peace. They will explain the current situation in Gaza, West Bank, Israel, the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire and possible solutions that can bring about peaceful co-existence of two peoples.
Speaker Bios:
Osama Iliwat
Osama is a board member of Combatants for Peace and co-founder of Visit Palestine. He has dedicated his life to opposing the Israeli occupation and apartheid while building meaningful relationships of solidarity between Palestinians and Israelis. He is featured in the documentary OBJECTOR and regularly speaks about peacebuilding with organizations across the world. He lives in Jericho, Palestine.
Iris Gur
Iris Gur (M.A. in Educational Administration and Leadership with Honors and B.Ed in Mathematics ) is an educator and human rights activist, a former school principal in the Israeli education system. She has successfully led organizational and pedagogical processes and changes while emphasizing the strengths and needs of both individuals and society. She has served as the Israeli Community Director at Combatants for Peace 2021-2023. Iris believes that knowing and understanding the Other, social responsibility and awareness are the foundations through which we can make our world better.
Sponsored by the International Responsibilities Task Force of the Social Responsibilities Round Table of the American Library Association
For more information or questions, please contact Frieda Afary at fafarysecond@yahoo.com
Abolitionist Visions and Intersections: Centering Human Relationships and Building Institutional Connections for Social Justice
Abolitionism is a positive, proactive, cross-sector project that redirects resources to ameliorate harms; promotes new forms of and investments in community health and well-being; centers the voices, experiences, and concerns of impacted individuals and communities; and addresses systemic, structural, and institutional injustice and deprivation. In both concept and practice, it opens up dimensions of activism, solidarity, and opportunity that expand upon the possible to illuminate the potential. Abolitionist-aligned campaigns and collectives around the world showcase the diversity and breadth of this critical work, demonstrating that there is no one vision of what this looks like—it is and will be the reality created by those committed to upending current systems of oppression and bringing something new into the world. Libraries preserve, document, protect, exhibit, archive, and disseminate information about the range of human experience. They also robustly resource their communities and seek to highlight and understand the impact of information access in people’s lives. In many ways, the library and the prison are diametrically opposed public institutions. Whereas libraries strive to embrace and promote shared humanity, equal access, critical literacy, social belonging, civic engagement, personal growth, and free circulation of information, the prison—a space defined by confinement and restriction—dehumanizes, isolates, withholds, and silences by nature and design. And yet, in practice, libraries and prisons have long been intertwined, and their complex relationship spans over two hundred years in this country.
For more info & session recordings, please visit the event page.
Current World Events Discussion Series
Check out topics & readings from previous sessions of our Current World Events Discussion Series
Intellectual Freedom, Social Responsibility, and Praxis in Librarianship and Education
(Nov. 15, 2023)
Event description: Intensified battles around book bans, censorship, public and school library funding, Critical Race Theory, African American Studies pedagogy, gender identity, and sexual orientation are at fever pitch across the country, raising critical questions about the nature of intellectual freedom, the purpose of literacy and education, the dissemination of information, and the interrelationships among them. The pervasiveness of these issues also illuminates how race and racism continues to structure key conversations and contexts about information access, pedagogy, and the historical record.
What is behind this most recent wave of the longstanding challenges to intellectual freedom, historical reckoning, and “dangerous ideas” in America? How does it connect or stand apart from previous repression and suppression of information, literacy, and history? And how can the related professions of librarianship and education inform one another’s efforts to uphold information access, historical integrity, and democratic principles? This panel will dig into these key questions and help contextualize, inform, and ignite our collective understanding and advocacy in these areas. Please join us!
Panelists:
- Nicole Cooke, Augusta Baker Endowed Chair, School of Information Science, University of South Carolina
- Carolyn Foote, Co-Founder of FReadom Fighters
- Johannah Genett, Deputy Director, Hennepin County Library
- Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History, University of California, Los Angeles