Injecting Border Thinking in how we train librarians to engage with immigrant neighbors: Lessons and opportunities — 2025

Injecting Border Thinking in how we train librarians to engage with immigrant neighbors: Lessons and opportunities

Facilitated Discussion | Tuesday, June 10th, 2025 | 1:45pm – 2:45pm EST

In keeping with the symposium theme of Decentering the West, this presentation draws from Gloria Anzaldua’s (1987)’s concept of Border Thinking to articulate a new direction for LIS education on library-immigrant partnerships. The presenters will explain the angst, disillusionment, and subsequent mobilization in creating a national library standard for service to immigrants. Our original initiative halted after the Trump administration’s attack on immigrants, libraries, and federal agencies. This sad and poignant experience will usher our conversation on ways to enact border thinking into LIS education and training on library service to immigrants. The Border Thinking concepts of liberation, coexistence, and boundary-crossing inspired our desire to deepen librarian training for immigrant outreach beyond traditionally prescriptive, safe, uncritical, and apolitical library-immigrant engagement.

[This discussion will be recorded.]

Presenters: Dr. Ana Ndumu and Hayley Park

Dr. Ana Ndumu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland College Park’s College of Information Studies’ MLIS program. She primarily researches and teaches on library services to immigrants—particularly, Black diasporic immigrants—along with methods for promoting racial realism and representation in LIS. She is the editor of Borders & Belonging: Critical examinations of library service to Immigrants and co-editor of The Black Librarian in America: Reflections, resistance, and reawakening.

Hayley Park is a Ph.D. student whose research focuses on the intersection of immigrant information experiences, PD/PAR methodologies, and the critical examination of technology in the rapidly changing information landscape. As a former library worker in diverse information settings, Hayley’s librarian-researcher praxis reflects a social justice-centered approach, focusing on examining and disrupting the conditions under which structural inequities are created, maintained, and reinforced, with attention to the multilayered costs of labor on workers and marginalized community members.