Episode 35: Dr. Isabel Espinal on on Outreach, Performativity, and Equity

LibVoices

Isabel Espinal is a Research Services Librarian for Afro-American Studies, Latin American, Caribbean, and Latinx Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, and Native American & Indigenous Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She was born in New York City, two years after her parents immigrated from the Cibao countryside in the Dominican Republic. She has an AB in Romance Languages and Literature from Princeton University, a Masters in Library and Information Studies from UC Berkeley, and an MA and Ph.D. in American Studies, English department, from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She is a past president of REFORMA, the National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish Speaking, and has written and given presentations on whiteness and diversity in librarianship, information literacy, the climate crisis and libraries, Dominican women writers in the United States, and Latinx literature, among other topics. Her most recent publication is the book chapter “Microaffections and Microaffirmations: Refusing to Reproduce Whiteness via Microaffirmative Actions,” in the book Dismantling Constructs of Whiteness in Higher Education, edited by Teresa Y. Neely and Margie Montañez and published by Routledge in 2022.