The NMU Archives, headed by university archivist Marcus Robyns, is set to hold a virtual discussion on the topic of “Critical Information Literacy: Consciousness Raising and Social Justice in the Archives”. The event will take place on Wednesday, Feb. 24, from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. and is in cooperation with ongoing racial justice related events put on by the Diversity Common Reader Program.
This year’s Diversity Common Reader is “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and centers on discrimination facing African Americans today. The book continues to be available for free through the program.
The archives presentation will involve an exercise in which attendees will interact with the archive’s historical primary source documents on social justice protests carried out by Black NMU students, which occurred in the late 1960s, according to the NMU event calendar.
“’Critical Information Literacy’ is a theory of learning that endeavors to impact social change,” according to the NMU event calendar. “Instructors can use the experiences and voices found in the papers and records (primary sources) collected by archives and special collections for classroom consciousness-raising activities that also teach information literacy skills.”