From ACRL EBSS list
Presenters: Dykee Gorrell
Live Session: Wednesday, June 17, 2026, 1:00-2:00 Central
Registration: https://ala-events.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QszFn0tRTlyM18dPa9ft4Q
Sponsored by the ACRL ULS Professional Development Committee
This session introduces an emerging instructional approach to teaching data management through a critical, human-centered lens that foregrounds the histories and lived experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Traditional data frameworks function as instruments of dehumanization, embedding anti-Black violence into their very structures of categorization, aggregation, and display-from plantation inventories and runaway advertisements to contemporary surveillance systems. This presentation explores how instruction in data ethics, curation, and abolitionist archival praxis can equip learners to interrogate how data are weaponized to create, categorize, and represent Black subjects-and to develop community-accountable principles for data practice that refuse such violence.
Drawing on critical data studies, Black Studies, and archival recovery projects, the session will model activities that compel reflection on data provenance, power, and positionality. Participants will examine how to design learning experiences that tether technical data management skills (metadata, documentation, storage) to ethical imperatives of representation, consent, and historical accountability. The session will also preview an ongoing initiative to develop a broader set of data principles for ethical stewardship, centering the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
Attendees will leave with instructional strategies building or revising their own frameworks for data teaching and practice.
Presenter Bio:
Dykee is an information scientist, academic and Data Librarian whose work sits at the intersection of data ethics, Black Science and Technology Studies, and archival theory. Her research and teaching interrogate how data architectures-from historical plantation records to contemporary algorithms-perpetuate anti-Black violence and epistemic erasure, and she develops community-accountable frameworks for data stewardship that centers the Black Radical Tradition and politics of refusal.
Currently, she is leading an initiative to develop a formal set of data principles for radical data stewardship centering the experiences of enslaved Africans and their descendants (which she has coined EAPD Data), grounded in Critical Data Studies, Black Studies, and archival theory. Her work has been supported by the ACRL ULS Professional Development Committee and informed by ongoing collaboration with archivists, data practitioners, and descendant communities working toward reparative knowledge practices.
This free presentation is sponsored by the ACRL University Libraries Section Professional Development Committee. It will take place on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, 1pm-2pm CT via Zoom. Register: https://ala-events.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_QszFn0tRTlyM18dPa9ft4Q
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Please direct questions and concerns to Katie Perry (kperry8@calstatela.edu) or Jane Hammons (hammons.73@osu.edu) of the ACRL ULS Professional Development Committee. A full list of the committee’s past programs is available on the ULS website.