Decolonizing the Discipline of Information Literacy

The emergence of scholarship focused on decolonizing information literacy (IL) indicates its importance and significance to the IL community. The recognition of information literacy (IL) as a maturing discipline has implications for the teaching and researching of IL, and for library and information science (LIS) education. While often associated with colonized university structures, scholars have argued that disciplines can be re-imagined to approach teaching and research in ways that are not, or not only, grounded in the colonizing epistemologies of the Western world. This paper identifies some ideas of the decolonization of IL presented in the scholarly literature and relates them to the sensibilities Warren and colleagues identify as necessary for the decolonizing of a discipline: dialogicality, multiplicity, and horizontality.