The third annual Symposium on Information for Social Good, hosted by the UNC School of Information of Information and Library Science (SILS) on April 26, was a tremendous success. Several panel sessions were standing-room only and the 2019 Kilgour Lecture and keynote address by Dr. Meredith Clark, PhD, filled the Hitchcock Multipurpose Room at the Sonya Hayes Stone Center to near capacity.

Slides from many of the panels are now available info4socialgood2019.web.unc.edu. Photos have been shared on Facebook and many highlights were posted in real-time using the hashtag #SILSSG2019.

Meredith Clark’s talk, “Black Women Tried to Tell Y’all: Race, Representation, and Self-Preservation through Digital Counternarratives,” has been posted on the SILS YouTube channel. Click below to watch the video.

Clark (@MeredithDClark) is an Assistant Professor in the University of Virginia Department of Media Studies. She is a former newspaper journalist whose research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. Her award-winning dissertation on Black Twitter landed her on The Root 100, the website’s list of the most influential African Americans in the country in 2015. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree from Florida A&M University and earned her PhD from the UNC School of Media and Journalism. Before joining the UVA faculty, she spent three years as a tenure-track assistant professor at the University of North Texas.

The annual SILS Symposium on Information for Social Good enables graduate and undergraduate students to address current ethical and social justice issues that impact information science through poster presentations and panels discussions that are open to the public. This year’s event included the annual OCLC/Frederick G. Kilgour Lecture.

The 2019 symposium, organized around the theme “Reflect. Reimagine. Rebuild,” addressed topics including accessibility in physical and digital library spaces, ethics in the e-sports industry, representation of people of color and LGBTQ+ populations in adult romance sections of public libraries, and the datafication of childhood.

Student participants came from four courses:

• Disability Informatics & Information, taught by SILS Assistant Professor Amelia Gibson with support from SILS PhD student Laura March
• Information Services in a Diverse Society, taught by SILS Professor Sandra Hughes-Hassell
• Information Ethics (graduate level), taught by SILS Assistant Professor Maggie Melo
• Information and Computer Ethics (undergraduate level), taught by Dianne Martin, Senior Faculty Fellow of the NC Study Center

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Related Research Areas: Equity and Inclusion