Censorship Is No Friend of Social Justice: Protecting Intellectual Freedom in Polarized Times – Transcript

00:00Hello, I'm Jim Turk. And I'm the director of the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University. I want to welcome you to today's uh event. The um the subject today is going to be on on um intellectual freedom. And the challenges that we're facing increasingly with the demands for censorship. Uh both in universities and in libraries.

00:26Uh I'd like to begin however by acknowledging that the territory on which I'm speaking to you today is the traditional territory of many nations including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishinaabe, the Chippewa, the Haudenosaunee, and the Wendat peoples. And today is is the home of many diverse First Nations, Inuit, and Métis. I also acknowledge that Toronto is covered by Treaty 13 with the Mississaugas of the Credit and the

00:52Williams Treaties with multiple Mississaugas and Chippewa bands. I also before we begin want to thank the co-sponsors for today's uh discussion. And they are the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Edmonton Public Library, the Milton Ontario Public Library, the US-based National Coalition Against Censorship, the Ontario Public I'm sorry, the Ontario Library Association,

01:18PEN Canada, the Toronto Public Library, and the Vancouver Public Library. Today libraries and universities are facing growing demands for censorship. Whose proponents see censorship as an essential tool to make a better world.

01:36School boards are facing demands that certain books be removed from school libraries. Public libraries are facing challenges not only to books and films in their collections, but also to programs they offer such as drag queen story time.

01:50Why are we seeing so many uh challenges and so much enthusiasm for censorship from all sides of the political spectrum. How should we How should public bodies respond to this? And what does all this mean for social justice and equity and the future of democracy?

02:10We're very fortunate today. Our featured guest is Emily Knox. Emily is one of the leading thinkers on intellectual freedom in North America. She's an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

02:27Her research interests include information access and intellectual freedom and censorship. She's a member of the Mapping Information Access Research Team. She's the author of several books. One is entitled The Foundations of Intellectual Freedom that was published last year. And one before that was Book Burning in 21st Century America, which I'm reading right now and is very interesting. She's chair of the US-based National Coalition Against

02:53Censorship. And she's the editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. Welcome, Emily. Hello. Our in conversation with Emily today will be Tony Sanek.

03:09Tony is a professor and former chair of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta. She's the author of a number of books including Intellectual Freedom and Social Responsibility in American Librarianship, Librarianship and Human Rights a 21st Century Guide, Information Ethics, Globalization, and Citizenship, and Minds Alive, Libraries and Archives Now.

03:33She twice convened the Canadian Library Association's Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom, served on the Canadian Library Canadian Federation of Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, and served two terms on the Canadian Association of University Teachers Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee. And she's the recipient of a number of teaching awards. Welcome Tony.

03:57Thanks for having me. The format for today's session will be a conversation between Tony and Emily. After about 45 minutes or so, they will turn to the audience so that you can join the conversation by asking questions or raising issues you'd like them to discuss. If you look at the bottom of your screen right now, you'll see at the bottom a button that says Q&A. So at any time

04:25during their conversation a question comes to mind that you would like to ask them or would like more information about or want them to follow up on, please just click on the Q&A button and record write down your question at that point. You don't have to wait till Tony turns to Ann Holmes who's the coordinator of the center to share the questions that have come in. So please as you're listening to them think of questions that you'd like to ask them and and write them down and then we'll have a time for significant

04:53contribution from the audience and their response to them. I think that's it. Over to you Tony and Emily. Look forward to your conversation. Thank you so much Jim and also to Angie and Luke and Emily for all the work to prepare for today. Emily, it's such a delight to have the opportunity to talk to you for an extended period of time this afternoon. Although I know it won't be enough and I'll look forward to catching up with you soon.

05:21When Jim was doing the land acknowledgement, I was actually visualizing roaming around the campus at Urbana-Champaign in Illinois as I was coming down from a doctoral student of course from the University of Wisconsin-Madison to use the American Library Association archives and I was digging into the American Library Association Social Responsibility Roundtable papers and those of you know the iconic library

05:46activist Sanford Berman and poking around at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, their papers set of papers on the Radical Research Center. And I know that you're at Illinois now, Urbana-Champaign, um and I you know, we could started crossing paths years ago at conferences, um moving in in our field what we or it's sort of interdisciplinary, of course, the information ethics community

06:14or intercultural information ethics community. And I I was really taken with your work and works of Rafael Capurro, um Uruguayan in Germany now, Germany-based and Hannes Britz in South Africa, Marty Smith in the US who's you know, went into went on to be a chaplain. And I noticed that you all had a background in religious studies um at the outset and I was wondering if you could just share a little bit of your

06:41journey to where you are today at Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. Sure. Well, thank you so much for inviting me to speak today. Um I think this is an incredibly important topic, not just because I study it, but because I think it has such an impact on all of us.

06:59Um so, where I usually like to start is to talk about my mom, who was a high school librarian for 32 years. And she was always bringing home the Banned Books Week items. And I noticed that my favorite authors would show up on those lists.

07:20And so, I often did my book reports on say, Judy Blume, who was one of my very favorite authors. Um and I was always very upset to see that she was on the list of most challenged books from the American Library Association. So, I guess I would say I've always been interested in this issue of banning books. Like, what are people trying to do when they try to ban a book?

07:45Um when I went to college, I did do uh religious studies. I was particularly interested in sociology of religion, especially looking at the Christian right in the United States. Um I did my senior thesis looking at fundamentalism and evangelicalism in the United States and their development.

08:06Um and that was what I did for my first graduate degree was expand my study of sociology of religion. Um and then thought I was going to get my PhD, but I actually stopped. I worked at a law firm for 2 years, which was very instructive. I learned I did not want to be a lawyer.

08:23Um I learned a lot about big law. I worked at one of the largest uh law firms in the world, which is Kirkland and Ellis um in their bankruptcy division and just learned a lot about what does it mean to get caught up in a huge legal system and how does big law operate. Um after that, uh my mom had always encouraged me to get my MSLIS.

08:50She said, you know, it's a great degree, you learn so much, you can be interested in so many different things, it goes with you. And so uh I finally decided to get my master's in library and information science here at Illinois.

09:04I worked as a theological librarian at the General Theological Seminary for the Episcopal Church um for 5 years in New York City. And then I realized I was ready to get my PhD and I knew exactly what I wanted to study. I wanted to study why people ban books.

09:21What I didn't know is the theory about it. What How was I going to talk about the reasoning behind it. So I um really got interested in book history and print culture while I was at Rutgers. Um I was introduced to this very this field that many people don't know about that people actually study the book as an object um, about text

09:46transmission um, through time and that is what really opened up a lot more vistas for me for thinking about my research because I was able to pull in um, how we think about reading, how we think about the book as an object, how um, knowledge is transmitted especially

10:11through text from one generation to another. Um, and that is really what I pulled in for my research and how I started thinking about why banned books. That was my main uh, area of research for my dissertation and it continues.

10:29Thank you. That's really helpful to have that background in and I'm pleased to say that our program at the University of Alberta still has our history of the book course, LIS 582. So, thank you for making such a strong case to keep that going to our curriculum committee.

10:44Um, listening to your journey, it does reinforce for me how many different groups and communities that you interact with especially now when you're doing so much media work and it I I remember I think the year was 2007 a colleague of mine here at from the University of Alberta uh, was president of the