2024 Annual ABQLA Conference

Date

May 10, 2024 

Location

Montréal

Details

Website: https://abqla.qc.ca/en/conference/

Theme: Can You Hear Me – M’entendez-vous?

The theme of this year’s ABQLA conference is Can You Hear Me – M’entendez-vous?

This theme was chosen to encompass ideas of listening, connecting and caring. We are not short on messages from each other and from the past to pay attention to, unearth and platform. The process of making meaning from this proliferation of voices is a political one, shaped by who we think is speaking, making noise, sounding. As librarians and archivists we care for and bring attention to situated knowledge, enacting our privilege to draw attention to particular ideas and ways of speaking, to ensure that particular voices are preserved and lifted up.

We also recognize that there are times when communication and understanding are difficult. Recent reconsiderations of hearing each other might be informed by remote conferencing’s newfound necessity, with longer-standing issues of silenced voices and structural inequalities underpinning one-sided or disrupted conversations. Whom has the library traditionally listened to? Who has it recently tried to care for, and how well is that working?