Many of our previous champions of free expression have been celebrated for their staunch defence of anyone’s and everyone’s right to expression. But Desmond Cole—the Toronto activist and author who is our champion for 2021—wants us to consider how language can be dehumanizing and even deadly.
We talk a lot about the freedom to read and the importance of free expression, but threats to these essential freedoms don’t always come from censorious governments or inflexible ideologies. Sometimes they come from global disaster.
With Freedom to Read Week 2021 taking place during a pandemic, we thought it would be helpful to provide a guide to organizing virtual events.
Among the values guiding the work of library workers: access to information, inclusion, and neutrality. It can be difficult not to compromise one value or the other in an attempt to achieve them all.
Ultimately, the initial cancellation of my talk at one elementary school hugely amplified my message. An attempt to censor, if challenged publicly, can lead to positive change.
In 2005, David Eby was starting his legal career when he was threatened with a lawsuit over comments that he’d made about a death.
It would’ve been easy to get upset, but I’ve been doing this work long enough to know the reason these things happen. I, and others, have more work to do. It’s a question of readiness, and the answer can be found in the history of representation.
Glad Day did not set out to be a hero of freedom of expression. The battles came to the bookstore, not the other way around.
In the digital age, public libraries have core capabilities and responsibilities to respond to intellectual freedom challenges.
The concept of freedom to read doesn’t accurately capture the dynamic between Indigenous languages and Canada. There is a history in this country of privileging one type of knowing and one type of “reading.”