The Academic Library and Critical Theory

The Academic Library and Critical Theory: Unpacking the Library with the Frankfurt School offers an incisive critique of the modern academic library, employing the work and concepts of key critical theorists to assess the academic library’s place in the modern world.

The book focuses on the work of several members of the Frankfurt School, including Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jurgen Habermas, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, and uses their concepts as a way to critically understand the academic library as an institution in the modern world. In using the work of the Frankfurt School as a lens, this book probes the complacency evident in many libraries around the globe despite the concurrent impact of funding cuts and the erosion of free speech on collections, services, spaces, and the profession itself. It is therefore argued that the modern academic library has drifted from its core mission of connecting users with information and instead has shifted away from its enlightenment roots towards the maintenance of the status quo.

This book offers a new and critical view of the academic library that will appeal to students, academics and practitioners interested in academic librarianship, library and information science, critical theory and the Frankfurt School.