Locating Information Literacy within Institutional Oppression

Abstract

The ACRL's draft Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education represents a chance to undo the neoliberal assumptions of earlier information literacy standards. Despite some positive changes, the language of the Framework still reinforces existing structures of power. The Framework relies on a rhetoric of crisis and on the metaphors "information marketplace" and "information ecosystem." These metaphors naturalize information resources as a series of walled gardens that might instead have been part of a larger commons.