Thank you to UCL for providing our first sponsored blog post of the LILAC 2026 season!
Over the last year, I have been taking ice-skating lessons. Now that I have progressed beyond the beginner stage (though you will still not be seeing me in a Spice Girl outfit à la Lilah Fear anytime soon, much as I secretly want this to happen), I have found that my teacher is increasingly asking me whether I can feel where I went wrong when I mess up a particular move or pattern down the ice. Interestingly, my answer is almost always no. I have to admit that I rarely have any idea of what she is talking about and, despite my best efforts, I often can’t feel any difference between doing something right or wrong- nor do I have much idea about what muscle or sensation I should be noticing or paying attention to. My bafflement is matched only by the incredulity of my teacher who, in the nicest possible way, finds it hard to understand how anyone is devoid of so much bodily awareness.
Luckily for me, my bodily reactions (or lack of them) in no way affect my enjoyment of the sport. However, I do find this experience interesting from an information literacy perspective. On the one hand, it strikes me how little we still know about the body’s role in shaping how we become informed. After UCL Professor Emeritus Annemaree Lloyd’s ground-breaking work in the early 2000s, when she exposed how the body represents an active site of knowing rather than just a carrier for the mind, there has been little progress in understanding (or feeling!) the impact that tactile, spatial, sensory and affective forms of engagement have on information literacy practices. The continued dominance of cognitive approaches to information literacy, which emphasise individual agency and decision-making rather than the broader sociocultural conditions that shape how bodily information is accessed or forbidden, limits understanding of so many contexts that are key to information literacy, including related to the digital environment, misinformation and dysregulation, amongst other areas (Lloyd & Hicks, 2027).
My inability to tune into specific bodily sensations and my teacher’s obvious facility in doing so, which is built over years of skating and coaching, is also a good reminder of how strange information literacy can be, particularly at a novice stage. Many authors have touched on cultural differences in academic contexts and the impact this has on information literacy practices (e.g., Flynn et al., 2023), but this research has yet not had much impact on official frameworks or teaching endeavours. Physical differences are even more invisible in information literacy thinking, with a small shout out to Amelia Haire, who blasted the lid off this seemingly locked box with her exploration of how sensory differences linked to neurodivergence recast understanding about how people come to know. There is so much more scope here, though, particularly related to embodiment – how might learning differences, gender, bodily precarity and more rip up what we thought we understood about what information literacy looks like (Lloyd & Hicks, 2027)? I encourage us all to commit to finding out. It is questions such as these that drive the MA and PhD programme in Library and Information Studies at UCL. Since the start of our information literacy module in 2014 we have been encouraging students to interrogate what we think we know about information literacy, as well as the ways in which we teach for it. From the very class, students are supported in seeing our class as a space to reflect on implicit assumptions or to consider how current thinking stands up in relation to personal experiences or prior academic knowledge. (We also talk quite a lot about skating…) This questioning stance also forms the backbone of MA dissertations and PhD theses when our award-winning lecturers, who include information literacy researchers and practitioners, Alison Hicks, Darren Flynn and Alice Corble, work one-on-one with students to explore the puzzles and enigmas that strike them; why is it that the field has never considered X or picked up on strand Y and what might Z approach bring to the table? Leading to incisive and nuanced research that we consider to be critical to our field, this approach, which is grounded in each of our lecturers’ professional expertise in academic, health, school, special and public library contexts, has been why our students have consistently been presenting and publishing on many of LIS’ most pressing identified strategic research topics in recent years.
We are pleased to showcase some of this innovation at LILAC 2026 and we encourage you to attend the exciting range of UCL presentations that are happening in Sheffield to get a flavour of our approach to information literacy research and practice! On the Wednesday, Alison and Darren, along with current students, Arielle Ben-Itzhak and Madeleine Williams, who was also awarded the Rowena Macrae Gibson bursary, will be showcasing our recent exploration of the role that teaching philosophies play in supporting professional development. Used to great success with new librarians in our information literacy module, teaching philosophies are also helpful for more experienced librarians in the field who are looking to reflect on their evolving practice. Please join us at our workshop to hear about our work in this area and have a go at some of our quick write exercises. Do also attend recent UCL graduate, Léa Watson, who will be presenting her dissertation research on the Monday. Léa carried out some fascinating research with health librarians last summer, inquiring into the use (and barriers) to the adoption of innovative teaching methods in health libraries. Come and find out how health librarians are working with constraints on their time as well as the various challenges they face (hint: don’t bring snacks into a hospital setting…).
And if this short overview of what we are up to has intrigued you, please do approach either Alison Hicks or Darren Flynn for an informal chat about our MA/PG Dip or PhD programmes at any point during the LILAC conference!
References:
Flynn, D., Crew, T., Hare, R., Maroo, K., & Preater, A. (2023). ‘They burn so bright whilst you can only wonder why’: Stories at the intersection of social class, capital and critical information literacy—a collaborative autoethnography. Journal of Information Literacy, 17(1), 162-185.
Haire, A. (2025). What does it mean to be information literate for an Autistic librarian in the academic library workplace?. Journal of Information Literacy, 19(1), 27-47.
Lloyd, A. & Hicks, A. (2027). What bodies know: Bringing embodiment into information practice research. In: Fourie, I (Ed.). Research Handbook on Information Behaviour. Edward Elgar Publishing.
