‘Information’ as conceptualized in the discipline of knowledge and information stewardship is not neutral as this discipline increasingly, in the current digital information age, engages historical, cultural, social, economic and political forces that interact with information.

 

Such forces may use information to advance dominant epistemic agendas and hence the need for researchers, students, practitioners and relevant stakeholders in knowledge and information stewardship and related fields, to critically engage and/or disrupt such forces in their curation of information for use in teaching and learning, research, professional practice, theory development, policy application, etc.

 

The knowledge and information stewardship discipline is very engaged in Africa, particularly in current artificial intelligence and the Fourth Industrial Revolution contexts in which information and information-related processes and their stewardship have become so computationally connected, resulting in information science schools, programmes and departments across the continent engaging research in areas such as research data management, research impact analysis,   information ethics, bibliometrics, altmetrics, webometrics,  metadata creation and management, scholarly communication (including open access), digital humanities, and many more.

Professor Raju's inaugural lecture focuses on questioning dominant western epistemology used in knowledge and information stewardship research, and in social science research generally, and positions the knowledge and information stewardship discipline to take the lead in effecting a ‘decolonial turn’ in research methodology generally.

 

Biography

Jaya Raju is Head of the Department of Knowledge and Information Stewardship, Humanities Faculty, University of Cape Town. She holds a PhD in Information Studies and  was promoted to full professor at UCT from 2020. She is a specialist researcher and author in library and/or information science (LIS) education and its epistemological implications for the discipline and for professional practice. She teaches research methodology and the broader philosophical, ontological and epistemological issues that impact the research process. She is currently contracted with Rowman & Littlefield publishers to produce a monograph titled Decolonizing LIS research methodology (due for completion in 2025). She produced an  LIS professional competency index for the higher education sector in South Africa (2017) and was a lead co-author, with Professor Clara Chu, of the IFLA (International Federation of Library Associations & Institutions) Guidelines for Professional Library and Information Science Education Programmes (2022). Her research has been published in national and international journals. Jaya Raju is Coeditor-in-Chief of Library Trends (journal of the Information Science iSchool at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Inaugural Coeditor of the international ALISE Book Series on LIS education and research. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science from 2012 to 2018. She also serves on the editorial advisory boards of several journals internationally and is a Subject Chair on the Scopus Content Selection & Advisory Board, evaluating journals for inclusion on the Scopus indexing list. She is currently Co-Chair, with Prof. Chu, of IFLA’s Building Strong LIS Education (BSLISE), an active global network of LIS educators and researchers from up to 20 countries and representing around 15 languages.