Michael Dudley
https://hdl.handle.net/10680/430
2024-03-19T04:08:19ZThe Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning
https://hdl.handle.net/10680/2068
The Role of Multidimensional Library Neutrality in Advancing Social Justice: Adapting Theoretical Foundations from Political Science and Urban Planning
Dudley, Michael; Wright, John
There is an ongoing, polarizing debate in the library profession and scholarship regarding the perceived incompatibility between library neutrality (embedded in the profession through the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights), and social justice goals. This article asserts that the growing antipathy on the part of some library practitioners and scholars towards neutrality and intellectual freedom is owed at least in part to the profession and scholarship having never articulated an adequate definition of what is meant by neutrality. As a result, the profession lacks a theoretical framework situating the library and library staff as political actors within a multicultural and largely urban society. We argue that such a framework may be drawn from the literatures of political science and urban planning. By positioning libraries and library workers within the context of liberal-democratic institutions – as is the case for urban planners in their theoretical literature – LIS theory can find more durable foundations for its core values. Stressing planning’s commitments to the participation of multiple publics, to dialogue, mediation and to consensus-building through liberal institutions, we develop a multidimensional understanding of neutrality premised on values, stakeholders, processes and goals which we then apply to these planning modes. Finally, we propose a model of “Communicative Librarianship” as best exemplifying these four dimensions of neutrality and their attendant democratic commitments.
2022-01-01T00:00:00ZTongue-Tied by Authorities: Library of Congress Vocabularies and the Shakespeare Authorship Question
https://hdl.handle.net/10680/2046
Tongue-Tied by Authorities: Library of Congress Vocabularies and the Shakespeare Authorship Question
Dudley, Michael; Boyle, William; Hatinguais, Catherine
Despite the existence of a vast literature reflecting hundreds of years of scholarship questioning the authorship of the works of Shakespeare, the conventional Library of Congress Name Authority File and Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are unable to accurately describe this literature owing to their assumption that the author was William Shakspere of Stratford-upon-Avon. Adopting a pragmatic, philosophically realist perspective based in social epistemology, this article highlights past and current deficiencies in the authority records concerning Shakespeare and proposes changes that would better reflect the nature and purpose of this literature, as well as the historic signifiers of the named persons in question.
2022-09-22T00:00:00ZStratfordian Epistemology and the Ethics of Belief
https://hdl.handle.net/10680/2019
Stratfordian Epistemology and the Ethics of Belief
Dudley, Michael
This article considers belief in the traditional biography of Shakespeare -- that he was the "man from Stratford" -- in terms of belief ethics, to determine whether or not it is ethical and praiseworthy, or unethical and blameworthy.
Pre-publication proof.
2022-09-08T00:00:00ZWith Swinish Phrase Soiling Their Addition: Epistemic Injustice, Academic Freedom, and the Shakespeare Authorship Question
https://hdl.handle.net/10680/1861
With Swinish Phrase Soiling Their Addition: Epistemic Injustice, Academic Freedom, and the Shakespeare Authorship Question
Dudley, Michael
This chapter argues that the near-universal exclusion from the academy of the Shakespeare Authorship Question (or SAQ) represents a significant but little-understood example of an internal threat to academic freedom. Using an epistemological lens, this chapter examines and critiques the invidious and marginalizing rhetoric used to suppress such research by demonstrating the extent to which it constitutes a pattern of epistemic vice: that, by calling skeptics “conspiracy theorists” and comparing them to Holocaust deniers rather than addressing the substance of their claims, orthodox Shakespeare academics risk committing acts of epistemic vice, injustice and oppression, as well as foreclosing potentially productive lines of inquiry in their discipline. To better understand this phenomenon and its implications, the chapter subjects selected statements to external criteria in the form of the Association of College and Research Libraries’ 2015 Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, which provides a set of robust normative dispositions and knowledge practices for understanding the nature of the scholarly enterprise. The analysis reveals that the proscription against the Shakespeare Authorship Question constitutes an unwarranted infringement on the academic freedom not only of those targeted by this rhetoric, but – by extension – of all Shakespeare scholars as well.
2020-11-23T00:00:00Z