Ancestral Calls: What if Learning is Bearing witness? And Other Derivatives of June Beer
Presentation | Thursday, June 12th, 2025 | 12:00pm – 12:30pm EST
This paper aims to engage readers with artist-activist-scholar-librarian June Beer of Nicaragua via a close reading of her poetry while tracing connections of field-specific library pedagogical practices that may be drawn from the ancestral calls evident within her work. Her geographic location informs her embedded community role as artist and librarian as well as her socio-cultural connection to her ancestral lineages. Sharing a close reading of Beer’s poetry, this presentation gives power to the language of poetry, and aims to draw conclusions of poetic form which identifies ancestral calls, and may be applied to library and pedagogical practice. Informed by Beer’s subversive work of poetics, activisms, and artmaking, sentipensante pedagogy, storytelling, place, and time, this presentation aims to reveal that within her writings are embedded useful tools for library and pedagogical practice, as informed not via traditional and normative librarianship, but via ancestral teachings, revelatory within the poetic articulations. The full article can be accessed via library subscription here.
[This discussion will be recorded.]
Presenter: Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz
Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz is the Dean of Library at Barnard College. Shawn co-chairs the Innovative Pedagogy Special Interest Group (SIG) for the Association of Library Information Science Educators (ALISE), co-leads the Reference & Instruction (SIG) for METRO, and co-leads the Fridays in May: Queer BIPOC Peer Networking Program for information science early professionals and students. She is managing editor of Sinister Wisdom: A Multicultural Lesbian Literary & Art Journal and the co-editor of Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Identity and Libraries, and Grabbing Tea: Queer Conversations in Archives and Practice (2024). More on Shawn at http://shawntasmithcruz.com.