Building on our Back to Basics: Academic Freedom in our Collective Agreements event in February, we invite you to deepen our shared understanding of academic freedom for librarians and archivists. Join us to learn, discuss, and strategize how we can collectively increase our capacity to understand, protect, and exercise academic freedom.
In addition to presentations from guest speakers Jennifer Dekker and Sam Popowich, attendees will be in discussion with peers to explore questions, obstacles, and opportunities related to academic freedom.
Event Details:
- In-person: Room HC 1600, SFU Harbour Centre at SFU Vancouver (515 West Hastings Street)
- Online: Zoom for lecture and Q&A portion of event: 9:30am-11:00am
Register for either in-person or online at this link
Speaker Bios:
Jennifer Dekker
Jennifer Dekker is a Research Librarian at the University of Ottawa supporting the Faculty of Arts. Jennifer is an active member of the Association of Professors of University of Ottawa, or APUO, and has served on health and safety committees, as President, and everything in between. She was recently elected to Senate and is learning to manoeuvre through its layers of academic bureaucracy and intransigence. Jennifer is a generous and frequent mentor to students who are pursuing librarianship at both the University of Ottawa and the University of Toronto and was recognized with an Arbor Award from the University of Toronto in 2025. She is in her final few months as Chair of the Librarians and Archivists Committee for the Canadian Association of University Teachers, an organization that was created to protect the academic freedom of academic staff – so that we can all practice, research and speak without fear of retaliation.
Sam Popowich
Sam Popowich is a librarian at the University of Winnipeg and a researcher in the politics of libraries, social justice, and technology. He is the author of Confronting the Democratic Discourse of Librarianship: A Marxist Approach, Solving Names: Worldliness and Metaphysics in Librarianship, and the forthcoming Knowledge Capital: Class, Culture, and Artificial Intelligence. Popowich holds a doctorate in Political Science from the University of Birmingham, where he worked on Canadian politics, political philosophy, and intellectual freedom controversies in Canadian libraries. He is also a sessional instructor in the MA Program in Cultural Studies at the University of Winnipeg.
