Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship (DKIS) Conference on Advancing Social Justice Through Curriculum Realignment

8-9 December 2024

Advancing Social Justice Through Curriculum Realignment: Centering Scholarly Communication in LIS Curricula

This conference is located within the 2nd Global Summit on Diamond Open Access: Centering Social Justice in Scholarly Communication to Advance Research as a Public Good.

A core goal of the Global Summit is to develop capacity through centering scholarly communication in Library and Information Science (LIS) education curricula. Hence, the theme of this conference: Advancing Social Justice Through Curriculum Realignment: Centering Scholarly Communication in LIS Curricula. See the full DKIS conference programme here.

The conference speaks to the following two complementary objectives of the Global Summit:

  1. Towards growing the next generation of scholarly communication leadership, the centering of scholarly communication in LIS curricula, is critical;
  2. To accelerate engagement on research assessment and quality assurance for the sustainability of the diamond open access model1.

A key aspect for a social justice/philanthropic-driven open access movement is the pedagogy associated with and/or required for the growth of open access. The Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship (DKIS) at the University of Cape Town (UCT) will host a conference on 8th and 9th December 2024. The primary purpose of this scholarly event is to advance the growth of open access through paying explicit attention to scholarly communication in LIS curricula. The focus of the conference is to critically interrogate the concept and principles of social justice within a LIS disciplinary framework and engage in discourse on the distinct association of scholarly communication with social justice and decolonisation. The event will also probe scholarly communication and LIS curriculum realignment and, scholarly communication and research impact.

The conference will involve two days of invited paper presentations (including two keynote addresses), rigorous discussion after each paper presentation and a panel discussion on the second day culminating in recommendations for curriculum action. The conference event will be preceded by invitations to global experts on scholarly communication and LIS curricula, submission of full papers, double-blind peer reviewing of the submitted papers, revisions based on peer review and, finally, publication of an open access edited monograph of the papers prepared for the two-day event. The published monograph will be launched at the Global Summit.

1Diamond Open Access is a publishing model in which readers do not pay for access and authors are not charged for publication (article/book processing charges).

Host