Taking stock of critical information literacy

Abstract

This special issue marks the culmination of over a year of planning on the editors’ part, and several hard months of writing, reviewing, and copyediting from the various authors and key players within the JIL scholarly infrastructure. As editors of this special issue, we originally set out with the goal of pushing the boundaries of critical information literacy (CIL) as it is currently understood. The field of CIL has been expanding gradually since Drabinski and Kumbier’s collection Critical Library Instruction (2010), as Tewell comprehensively covers in his 2015 summary. More recently, the field has profited from valuable practical publications, including Pagowsky and Kelly’s Critical Library Pedagogy Handbooks (2016) and Brookbank and Haigh’s collection Critical Library Pedagogy in Practice (2021), which focus on good practice for critical approaches to information literacy (IL) instruction and teaching in higher education. From our UK experience, it also seems that discussions around how to make education and teaching more inclusive and socially just more often include acknowledgement that libraries and librarians have a role to play, and that more librarians are both exploring critical pedagogies and applying them to their IL practices. However,