Board Director | LIS Leader | PhD Candidate
The best library and leadership spaces I’ve ever been in involved epistemic inclusion. That is, inclusion related to knowledge. Specifically, uplifting and legitimising diverse and marginalised ways of knowing. Libraries have always been about information and knowledge. But we haven’t historically gotten our own influence right. The history of libraries holds a civilising legacy, often…
A few years ago, I sat in on a leadership webinar about influencing. I found myself counting up which of the recommendations I’d actually find off-putting, despite their being positioned as rapport-building. From my perspective, it lacked the social and cultural nuances of other rooms I sat in. I was there, in the room, in…
“Access is a beginning, not an end point … accountability toward disability access means committing to cycles of success, failure, and (re)iteration. Put another way, access is a long-term commitment to do better” (Hamraie, 2016, p. 267). Two of the most common misconceptions I hear in leadership about disability and neurodivergence are that access and…
This blog post is shared with the permission of my PhD supervisor, who was part of these conversations. I had disability accommodations for a PhD milestone this year. It’s not something I’ve opted for often (or for a while), and it ended up being a positive experience. A colleague who was encouraging me from the…
One of my favourite leadership roles has been one with a remit that included (but wasn’t limited to) bringing my lived experience of disability and neurodivergence to the table. It wasn’t my only responsibility, and my expertise was recognised as going well beyond my lived experience, but its value and opportunity for impact were made…