Cultivating a Culture of Care: Trauma-Informed Librarianship: Cultural, Historical, & Gender Issues
Supported by a Carnegie Whitney Grant from the American Library Association.
Cultural, Historical, & Gender Issues
The library champions inclusivity and dismantles cultural barriers (race, ethnicity, LGBTQ+, age, location). It provides services tailored to diversity and fosters healing through respectful engagement with cultural traditions. Additionally, it acknowledges and works to address the effects of past injustices.
How do we ensure that our organization does not promote biases and stereotypes with our actions, environment, and services?
Additional Resources
- Being Anti-Racist Is Central to Trauma-informed Care: Principles of an Anti-Racist, Trauma-informed OrganizationThis guide explores the connection between anti-racist organizations and trauma-informed care, highlighting the importance of both due to the prominence of current and historical anti-Black racism.
- Bringing Trauma Informed Care to Trauma Exposed LGBTQ YouthThis guide provides information on how to better support and advocate for LGBTQ youth.
- Creating the Trans-Inclusive Library: A Practice GuideThis guide creates activities that librarians and their parent institutions can complete in order to create a more inclusive environment for trans students, employees, and patrons.
- Embedding Culturally Responsive Practices into Trauma-Informed SchoolsThis article discusses how educators can provide culturally responsive, trauma-informed supports that respect and value students' cultures.
- Undoing Institutional and Racial Trauma Through Interprofessional, Trauma-Informed EducationThis paper describes a novel interprofessional curriculum and its focus on trauma-informed care—notably, including institutional and racial trauma—that was implemented by Yale University for medical, physician associate, and advanced practice registered nursing students.
You're Doing It Wrong: The evolution of cultural competence
Book Recommendations
- Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability" McRuer examines how dominant and marginal bodily and sexual identities are composed, and considers the vibrant ways that disability and queerness unsettle and re-write those identities in order to insist that another world is possible."
- Legacy: Trauma, Story, and Indigenous Healing" Suzanne Methot uses history, human development, and her own and others’ stories to trace the roots of Indigenous cultural dislocation and community breakdown in an original and provocative examination of the long-term effects of colonization."
- Life Isn't Binary: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between"Challenging society's rigid and binary ways of thinking, this original work shows the limitations that binary thinking has regarding our relationships, wellbeing, sense of identity, and more."
- My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Mending of Our Bodies and Hearts"In this book Resmaa Menakem examines damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of body-centered psychology."
- Our Deepest Roots: Navigating Past Trauma To Build Healthier Queer Relationships"Dr. Jen Towns shares stories from her own personal and professional experiences to explore how trauma in childhood or adulthood, combined with being part of the queer community, can impact relationships."
- Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More"With unflinching honesty, Mock uses her own experience to impart vital insight about the unique challenges and vulnerabilities of trans youth and brave girls like herself."
- Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto"From the founder and creator of The Nap Ministry, Rest Is Resistance a field guide for the weary and hopeful. It is rooted in spiritual energy and centered in Black liberation, womanism, somatics, and Afrofuturism."
- The Future Is Disabled: Prophecies, Love Notes, and Mourning Songs" Piepzna-Samarasinha writes encouragement to disabled folks, relishing in our community’s creativity in our fight for survival."
- Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice Black Lives, Healing, and US Social Transformation"In The Little Book of Race and Restorative Justice, Davis highlights real restorative justice initiatives that function from a racial justice perspective; these programs are utilized in schools, justice systems, and communities, intentionally seeking to ameliorate racial disparities and systemic inequities."