Love Is a Lens: Locating Love in Library and Information Studies

Abstract

Library and information studies (LIS) has yet to see an exploration of the workings of love, as a force that both explicitly and implicitly underpins practices and rhetoric within our discipline. Understanding the “force” that is love requires analysis of social, and collective, relations. This paper draws on selected literature in order to present such an exploration for the first time. As this paper illustrates, love provides a distinctive, feminist lens onto structures and power dynamics. It can illuminate, and create opportunities to address, divergent challenges within LIS and the world at large.