This book shows how today’s waves of book bans and disinformation campaigns intentionally drive the cultural erasure of marginalized communities—and what we can do to stop them.Across schools, libraries, and museums—in the United States and elsewhere—the coordinated onslaught of efforts to remove books and roll back diversity initiatives are reshaping public life. While both these methods of cultural control have been widely used for centuries, their nefarious role as part of a larger effort has been overlooked. This book connects the dots between censorship, disinformation, and cultural erasure and explores the sturdiness of democracy in a period of enormous political upheaval.Blending research with real-world examples across time and place, it offers practical ways to push back on this alarming movement—through advocacy strategies, direct actions, educational activities, research initiatives, and legal and policy changes.When we understand these threats as interconnected, we are better able to combat them. This perspective empowers educators, cultural heritage professionals, and supporters of democratic institutions to defend the spaces where knowledge is shared and preserved.
Paul T. Jaeger, PhD, JD, is a Professor, Distinguished Scholar-Teacher, and Co-Director of the Doctor of Information Science degree program in the College of Information at the University of Maryland, USA.
Author’s NoteAcknowledgments1. Introduction2. Silencing Others3. Cultural Erasure4. Censorship5. Disinformation and Redirected Realities6. Polycrisis7. Censorship Comes for the Library8. Criminalizing Librarianship9. Othering and Structures of Feeling10. The Impossibility of Neutrality11. Navigating the Politics of Hatred12. Connecting and Reconnecting13. Waking Up the Nation14. Next and AlwaysReferencesIndexAbout the Author
Book Bans, Disinformation, and Cultural Erasure is exactly the book we need right now: drawing together the myriad issues the US and its libraries face. Jaeger is exactly the person to tackle the phenomena of this volume: a scholar with deep learning and research who engages public matters. He covers not just contemporary issues but the long tail of their history and context that gives them current resonance and oxygen. At each step Jaeger brings the stakes – social, political, educational – to bear on libraries and learning and democratic society. It is also very well written. In all, a feat of synthesis and analysis that will define both scholarship on and how we think about the last decade and a half.