The Praxis of Relation, Validation, and Motivation: Articulating LIS Collegiality through a CRT Lens

cal raced/gendered epistemologies are supported by validation theory within a relationalcultural mentoring framework, and how they work to empower both students and librarians to assert their rightful places as scholars and members of a larger academic community. We also borrow from Latina/o Critical Theory (LatCrit), which, in concert with CRT, emerged as a theoretical framework from legal studies, to theorize issues particular to the Latinx identities shared by many of our students, such as language, immigration and citizenship status, and identity. A LatCrit analysis is especially valuable now, in a place and time where students and their families are literally criminalized and targeted for deportation. For ourselves and for our students, the axis of citizenship/legal status intersects with language, class, and phenotype to articulate a specific raced subjectivity that is politically targeted. All of these intersections impact both our worldview and the ways we are perceived by our students and colleagues. We see our professional practice, including teaching, research, and service, in alignment with Solórzano’s five defining elements of CRT in educational research: