A Critical Conversation on AI in Librarianship

Presenters

Maria T. Accardi

Maria T. Accardi is the author of Feminist Pedagogy for Library Instruction (2013). She is also co-editor of Critical Library Instruction: Theories and Methods (2010), and editor of The Feminist Reference Desk: Concepts, Critiques, and Conversations (2017).  Maria is the Coordinator of Instruction and Assessment at Indiana University Southeast, a regional campus in the IU system, located in New Albany, Indiana. Maria holds a BA in English from Northern Kentucky University, an MA in English from the University of Louisville, and an MLIS from the University of Pittsburgh. Her primary research and writing interests address the intersections of information literacy, reference work, social justice, and feminist and other critical pedagogies. Her current project is a co-edited collection of essays for Critical Perspectives on AI in Librarianship, with Tessa Withorn, to be published by Library Juice Press in 2027.

Sam Popowich

Sam is an academic librarian in Winnipeg, Canada. He is the author of Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship: A Marxist Approach (2019), Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship (2024), and the forthcoming Knowledge Capital: Culture, Class, and Artificial Intelligence for Library Juice Press. He has a PhD in political science from the University of Birmingham, is a member of the University of Winnipeg’s Centre for Research in Cultural Studies, and teaches in the University’s Cultural Studies program.

Kailyn Slater

Kailyn “Kay” Slater is a Chicago-based public library worker and independent scholar at the intersection of information studies, critical cultural studies, and science and technology studies, with contributions to Library Trends, Information Technology and Libraries, Fast Capitalism, and The American Archivist. Slater is the winner of the 2025 Annual Library Juice Paper Contest for their work “Against AI: Critical Refusal in the Library.” Slater has a MSLIS from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a MA in Communication from the University of Illinois Chicago.

Tessa Withorn

Tessa Withorn is the Science Librarian and an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. Tessa has published and presented on a variety of topics including library instruction, critical information literacy, online learning, and artificial intelligence. She is currently working on a co-edited collection of essays for Critical Perspectives on AI in Librarianship, to be published by Library Juice Press in 2027.