Lisa Sloniowski wins Fourth Annual Library Juice Paper Contest

PRESS RELEASE
October 1, 2016
Sacramento, CA

Library Juice Press is happy to announce the winner of the Fourth Annual Library Juice Paper Contest. Lisa Sloniowski’s paper, titled, “Affective Labor, Resistance, and the Academic Librarian,” published in Library Trends, was judged by the award jury to be the best paper out of 19 submitted in this year’s contest. The award jury consisted of three members and evaluated papers in a blind process. The jury wrote,

“‘Affective Labor, Resistance and the Academic Librarian’ extends the traditional analysis of librarianship as a feminized profession by drawing on Marxist and Autonomist conceptions of labor to make an important and urgent argument for the role of affective labor in librarianship generally, and reference and liaison librarianship specifically. This immaterial, affective work is increasingly subject to post-Fordist metrics that devalue or disregard the emotional and intellectual subtleties underpinning the work of librarians; baked into the long conversations with students and faculty who may “leave [our] office[s] in tears” (647); or the nuance and care required to develop and curate an intellectually honest research collection. Underscoring the value of librarianship in the digital age and in the context of the neoliberal university we are reminded that we need be mindful of the decisions we make as we move forward as stewards of libraries and librarianship and offered potential modes of resistance.”

Ms. Sloniowski is Associate Librarian at York University in Toronto.

The award for honorable mention goes to Anne Gilliland and Michelle Caswell’s “Records and Their Imaginaries: Imagining the Impossible, Making Possible the Imagined,” published in Archival Science.

The Library Juice Paper Contest winner receives an award of $1000. The intention of this contest is to encourage and reward good work in the field of library and information studies, humanistically understood, through a monetary award and public recognition. Papers submitted may be pending publication, or published (formally or informally) in the year of the award. Any type of paper may be entered as long as it is not a report of an empirical study. Examples of accepted forms would be literature review essays, analytical essays, historical papers, and personal essays. The work may include some informal primary research, but may not essentially be the report of an empirical study.

The critera for judgment are:

– Clarity of writing
– Originality of thought
– Sincerity of effort at reaching something true
– Soundness of argumentation (where applicable)
– Relevance to our time and situation

Entries in next year’s award are due August 1st, 2017.

Library Juice Press is an imprint of Litwin Books, LLC specializing in theoretical and practical issues in librarianship from a critical perspective, for an audience of professional librarians and students of library science.

Media contact:
Rory Litwin
218-260-6115
rory@libraryjuicepress.com
PO Box 188784, Sacramento, CA 95818

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