A young woman with blonde hair taking a selfie outside on a cloudy day. She is wearing a black puffer jacket, a patterned fleece, and is holding a black handbag. There is a brick house with a sliding glass door behind her, and in the background, an outdoor patio with string lights and a wooden fence.

I am a queer AuDHD librarian, advocate, artist, and writer.

I am currently working at the University of Guelph Library, as a Research and Scholarship Librarian.

My ongoing projects span listening to, gathering,

dreaming about, and attending to

what often goes unnoticed and overlooked

in the peripheral.

My current research is focused on a reflexive development of identity-oriented library teaching practices through the re(storying) of my experiences, as a researcher and writer, with scholarly research and publication. My research involves revisiting my master’s degree thesis to develop a scholarly publication output. Using a critical autoethnographic narrative approach, I am documenting, engaging with and reflecting on my processes, perceptions and orientations to academic research and writing. This work attends better understanding how I both understand my experiences now, and to how those experiences were understood and shaped before I had the language, authority, or positionality of an academic librarian.

I am particularly interested in (re)storying my own professional and educational experiences to examine how dominant pedagogical approaches, normalized within higher education institutions, sustain epistemic harm, ableism, and neuronormativity for Autistic, neurodivergent, and disabled library users, and how the intersections of racism and colonialism simultaneously give rise to woven networks of solidarity, refusal, and subversive inquiry. I insist on making space for “othered” ways of knowing, making, and surviving within, against, and beyond entrenched systems and exclusionary structures.

Autistic and neurodivergent ways of sensing, processing, and connecting is imperative for (re)valuing difference, for understanding and calling attention to histories of ableism that shape how we are allowed to know and be known.

My Teaching POSITIONALITY STATEMENT

My teaching praxis strives to foster an environment that acknowledges and supports the emotional aspects of research, values students’ ways of knowing, creates a culture of care and community, and builds critical thinking skills for self confidence.

My approach to working as an academic librarian, is rooted in the belief that learning is not just about content, but about how we come to understand ourselves in relation to that content. This includes confronting and sitting with the epistemic harm of upholding and operating within the traditional power dynamics in higher education, and intentionally and iteratively co-creating spaces where all library users, students and researchers feel seen, valued, and supported.

This means creating space for learners by:

validating the emotional aspects of the research process

inviting students to move at different paces

returning to ideas and questions iteratively

making the hidden curriculum visible

and engaging with knowledge through multiple entry points

Moving beyond universal design principles, this work also advocates for a radically inclusive approach that is both disability-conscious and justice-oriented; actively challenging ableist, racist and colonial harms embedded in academic structures.

I believe that all educators and library workers must be supported with resources, professional development opportunities, and spaces for rest and reflection to sustain this critical work. Through this work, I aim to create learning spaces where students not only gain critical thinking skills, but also develop community, confidence, agency, and a sense of belonging in their learning journeys.