Decolonizing Library and Information Science Research Methodology

Engage decolonial perspectives in LIS research methodology. ‘Information’ as conceptualized in the discipline of Library and Information Science (LIS) is not neutral.LIS services increasingly, in the current digital information age engage historical, cultural, social, economic, and political forces that interact with information.Such forces may use information to advance dominant epistemic agendas and hence the need for LIS researchers, students, practitioners, and other relevant stakeholders to critically interrogate and even disrupt such forces in their curation of information for use in research, practice, theory development, policy application, etc.This book engages decolonial perspectives in LIS research methodology for a transformative and critically reflexive approach to research that is community-based, culturally responsive and impactful for Indigenous and other historically marginalized communities.It positions decolonization as rejecting the privileging in scholarship of dominant western knowledge systems and intellectual traditions; and calls for the centering, in research and knowledge production, of perspectives, insights, and knowledges of Indigenous and other marginalized societies so that research may be inclusive of all knowledge systems, respectful of the researched, and of different ways of knowing embedded in the worldviews of others.