The spirit of knowledge: Creating spiritual competency for critical information spaces

Abstract

The industry-wide effort to integrate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices into the LIS field opens a wider conversation for fostering cultural humility in LIS work. Cultural humility, a necessary aspect of DEI, cannot be achieved by approaching non-Western cultures through Western assumptions of the world when these assumptions perpetuate the mystification, alienation, and invalidation of non-Western cultural knowledge and expression—especially those that center metaphysical or spiritual aspects in their knowledge systems. Unless disrupted, this limitation of current DEI initiatives will further invalidate cultural practices, identity, and Indigenous Systems of Knowledge, leading to whitewashed representations of culture within collections, reference services, programming, and other library systems. This paper discusses spiritual competency as a prerequisite to cultural humility, the harm caused by its absence, as well as the tools and frameworks that, when practiced, can create spiritual competency.