A new blog post series: “Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance languages”

«The UvA wants to be a university where everyone feels at home and feels respected. Diversity and inclusion are important core values for us. We recognize that prejudice, discrimination and racism also occur at the UvA and we pursue an active diversity policy to help reduce inequality, remove barriers and create equal opportunities for everyone» (UvA website).

source: Creative Multilingualism (University of Oxford)

If the UvA official policies and the vast (academic) debate on diversity, inclusion, equity and decolonization weren’t enough, it’s the red thread running through the last years at Blognostrum that definitely convinced me to develop a series of posts, parallel to those that my colleagues and I are publishing at Library333, under the title Inclusive searches & sources @UvA Romance Languages.

The red thread

Authors’ choice for several quotes:

• women writers such as Ada Gobetti, Alicia Giménez-Bartlett, Carmen Laforet, Natalia Ginzburg, Sibilla Aleramo, Simone de Beauvoir, Toni Morrison and Wislawa Szymborska;
• intellectuals such as Martinican poet, playwright, essayist and politician Aimé Césaire and Spanish (homosexual) author Federico García Lorca.

Posts about:

• modern Italian women artists such as Adriana Bisi Fabbri, Anna Marongiu, Letizia Battaglia and Maria Lai;
• migrant and foreign people, in their (tragic) relations with the Mediterranean sea, or as referred to in Primo Levi’s If this is a man, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and Virgil’s Aeneid, or as discussed by (Italian) writers and intellectuals;
• (academic) freedom, whether related to the Italian university professors’ oath allegiance to fascism in 1931, or Piero Calamandrei’s Speech on the Constitution, or Umberto Eco’s Ur–Fascism.

The series (twice a month)

1) search tips, tricks & strategies to find more diverse literature, in terms of:

• authors belonging to groups traditionally underrepresented in academia;
• Countries of origin i.e. working elsewhere than in (Western) Europe, North America and Oceania;
• languages other than English;
• epistemological perspectives other than standard Eurocentric ones.

2) reviews, and reading recommendations and lists of (scholarly) sources available at the UvA Library or open access online, about topics such as:

• ableism
• ageism
• decolonization
• diversity
• equity
• fact checking
• gender & sexuality
• historical memory
• inclusion
• language & terminology
• (anti)racism

(Purchase) suggestions from staff and students are welcome and part of what I consider a collaborative effort to help broaden and diversify both the UvA Library collections and the way staff and students, assisted by Information specialists, search, find and evaluate (scholarly) information.

A happily (more) diverse, equitable, and inclusive new year to everyone!