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The philosophical lineage of intellectual freedom in libraries relies mainly on either J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, or a combination of the two. Often, Mill’s influence goes unacknowledged, because Mill’s liberalism and the reasoning used to justify it, is hegemonic in Western bourgeois society. We breathe...

Antonio Gramsci has long been a critical darling in LIS, in part because his philosophy - stripped of its revolutionary power - is easily assimilatable to the profession’s unacknowledged liberalism. He adds a touch of red spice to an otherwise bland and unpalatable porridge of political commitments. Stephen Bales’ “counterhegemonic...

History is what hurts. - Fredric Jameson I somehow missed Richard Beaudry’s post post on the Ryerson CFE site last December. In the post, Beaudry asks “What is it about Meghan Murphy that is polarizing some librarians and academic librarians as well as some library associations in Canada and why...

I’ve been rereading the Weld v. Ottawa Public Library Ontario Superior Court decision, as well as Allana Mayer’s post about it and the more I think about it, the more I think this decision completely undermines the legal justification of TPL’s and VPL’s decisions rent space to transphobic speakers in...

Since October of 2018 I’ve been pursuing a distance PhD in political science from the University of Birmingham. My research project was on Italian Theory (e.g. autonomist Marxism), AI, and jobs in Canada. While I was engaged with the political theory part, it was hard to really dig into the...