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The Concept of Information Literacy in Policy-Making Texts: An Imperialistic Project?
- Library Trends
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 60, Number 2, Fall 2011
- pp. 338-360
- 10.1353/lib.2011.0040
- Article
- Additional Information
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Organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) put a lot of effort in advocacy and policy making for information literacy (IL). Their ambition to foster IL can be seen as a part of a multinational educational project. By exporting a Western IL model focused on textual information sources and the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) into non-Western contexts that to a great extent lack ICTs, the educational project for IL runs the risk of turning into an imperialistic project. A discursively oriented analysis of two prominent policy documents—discussed in the light of the so-called new imperialism and the idea of invisible technologies—indicates a standardized one-size-fits-all-model of IL. Through establishing a close contact between the policy-making strand and the research strand in the IL literature and by adhering to the broad concept of information literacies, the risk of imperialism and oppression might lessen.