Stripping the Stacks: Librarians, Pornography and Pedagogical Possibility

When librarians and faculty work together as research partners, building unique collections and developing mutually constitutive research questions, new pedagogical possibilities emerge demonstrating the relationship between research, libraries, librarians and teaching. Students enter into critically engaged conversations about collection development, canonization and the role of libraries and archives in dominant forms of knowledge production. When the research investigates the role and history of libraries in relation to the contested terrain of pornography in particular, such work uniquely lays bare the relatively invisible practices and implications of archival and library work to our students. Porn then, exposes the gears of archival knowledge production, strips the Library of its clothes, and, because librarians are positioned as scholarly activists and allies in this conversation rather than as institutional agents, allows for a more fulfilling set of relations to develop between librarians, students and faculty.