Introduction

This chapter will discuss the commitment to anti-racist practice by library workers who seek to engage with social movements – predominantly led and created by university students and progressive academics – calling for social justice in educational spaces, in particular, in the westernised university, which has many sites around the world due to the ongoing influence of empire and colonialism. It will look at how our praxis as library workers is steeped in racism and coloniality, hence the use of the term ‘decolonisation’ and/or ‘decoloniality’. It will also focus on the work of the Liberate Our Library initiative at my current institution, Goldsmiths, University of London, which posits itself in the arena of critical librarianship, which draws from critical theory, critical information literacy and critical race theory (CRT), which asks library workers to ‘consider the historical, cultural, social, economic, political and other forces that affect information’ (Gregory and Higgins, 2013, 7). hooks writes of the classroom as a space to experience freedom, and eventually empowerment, through rethinking teaching practices that lead to systemic changes around race and representation. So too can library workers ‘transgress’ by rethinking professional practices that disempower and silence certain voices and experiences, and instead work with educators and users to empower the voices kept silent for far too long.

Using such terminologies can often depend on the racial and cultural identity of the author, their geographical location, their class, their socio-economic status and their experience of the education system in which they were taught. I am a Black, British, working-class woman of mixed heritage (German/Hungarian–Jamaican) born and raised in London and educated in the comprehensive, state school system – a system that to this day does not teach Black British history to school children. A UK-based social enterprise called The Black Curriculum (2019), with its roots in student-led activism, has taken up the mantle to go into schools and teach Black British history, due to the ‘lack of Black British history in the UK Curriculum’.