Safeguarding Intellectual Freedom

American librarians are increasingly becoming the latest targets in the political and cultural wars spreading across the country, part of a growing movement to ban books, censor ideas, and restrict educators’ ability to discuss race, gender, identity, and LGBTQ+ issues in the classroom. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Juno Dawson’s This Book is Gay, and Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, have all landed on recent censorship lists in 2022 alone, which the American Library Association (ALA) reports was a year that saw the “highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.”

How can freedom-to-read advocates and community members respond to counter these divisive strategies and rhetoric which portray libraries as spaces of indoctrination and librarians as villains peddling harmful literature?

Inspired by recent scholarship, such as The Urge to Censor: Raw Power, Social Control, and the Criminalization of Librarianship (Paul T. Jaeger et al), and motivated by the turmoil facing ALA, with censorship proponents calling for conservative states to end their memberships in ALA and some ALA members calling for a bifurcation of the organization into  “liberal” and “conservative” ideologies, the University of Maryland Libraries presents a virtual dialog among experts and scholars in the field, on Tuesday, August 29, 2023, from 3:00-4:30 pm ET, to examine the challenges facing academic and public libraries and explore the actions that can be taken to ensure libraries remain bastions of intellectual freedom for all.

This webinar is offered as part of the UMD Libraries’ Living Democracy Initiative. 

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