By Lily Natter
The 2024 David Kaser Endowed Lecture Series
The David Kaser Endowed Lecture Series regularly invites an exceptional scholar to IU Bloomington’s campus to give a lecture relevant to the field of library and information science and meet with students and faculty. This year, Dr. Nicole A. Cooke presented on “The Competent Humility Model: Merging the Powers of Cultural Competence and Cultural Humility.”
The Competent Humility Model is focused on the development of two types of so-called “soft skills”: cultural competence and cultural humility. Dr. Cooke pointed out that soft skills such as these are vital and important, just as important as technical knowledge. To promote effective communication, collaboration, and mutual respect, it is essential to understand and navigate diverse cultural landscapes. These two concepts work in tandem to foster inclusive environments and bridge cultural divides:
Cultural competence: the ability of a person to effectively interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of various cultural backgrounds.
Cultural humility: incorporates a lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique, to redressing the power imbalances, and to developing mutually beneficial and non-paternalistic partnerships with communities on behalf of individuals and defined communities.
The development of these concepts in Dr. Cooke’s updated Competent Humility Model is divided into two main categories: the pre-competence journey and the competence journey. However, the model is an active cycle individual to each person. Just because someone has achieved cultural competence and humility in one situation or community does not mean they have mastered it overall. It is a lifelong commitment and a constant learning process.
The cycle begins in the pre-competence journey, with these three steps: cultural repudiation and harm, cultural indifference, cultural avoidance. These beginning stages of development are what counteract progress in forming relationships with people. The second part of the model is the competence journey, including: precompetence, competence, cultural dexterity and safety, cultural activism. The crucial turning point is between precompetence and true competence, which is when a person moves from being familiar and agreeing with the humility concepts ideologically to actively practicing them in their life. Embracing these concepts fosters a more inclusive and harmonious society where diversity is celebrated and understanding flourishes.
After the talk, Dr. Cooke answered several questions from both faculty members and students, ranging from how to deal with culturally incompetent colleagues, connecting to a new community, and preparing library and information science for the realities of their careers. The next day, Dr. Cooke was also the keynote speaker at the 2024 Doctoral Research Forum, where she gave a talk titled “Leaders Wanted,” and was focused on the doctoral education of information and library science students.
Dr. Cooke is the Augusta Baker Endowed Chair and a Professor at the School of Library and Information Science at the University of South Carolina. Her interests in teaching and research lie in the realms of human information behavior, fake news consumption and resistance, critical cultural information studies, LIS education, and diversity and social justice in librarianship. Now the founding editor of ALA Neal-Schuman’s Critical Cultural Information Studies book series, Dr. Cooke has published numerous articles and book chapters. Her books include the second edition “Information Services to Diverse Populations” (ALA Editions, expected in 2024), “Fake News and Alternative Facts: Information Literacy in a Post-truth Era” (ALA Editions, 2018), and “Foundations of Social Justice (ALA Editions, expected in 2025).
The ILS Doctoral Research Forum
Every fall, Information Science doctoral students have the wonderful opportunity to present at the ILS Doctoral Research Forum. This event gives them the chance to share their research with peers and faculty members, receive feedback, and compete for an award. This year, the forum hosted ten student presenters, as well as a keynote speech from Dr. Nicole A. Cooke, who also presented at the 2024 Kaser Lecture just the day before.
Dr. Cooke’s talk was titled “Leaders Wanted” and it focused on the professional and academic development that occurs during a doctoral education. She shared some confessions of a former doctoral student through the lens of someone who is now a doctoral educator, her thoughts on the library and information studies pipeline, and her advice for self-care. She also talked about her work with the Spectrum Doctoral Fellowship Program, which is an ALA Fellowship that seeks to reinforce and expand efforts to recruit racially and ethnically diverse individuals to the LIS professorate.
This year, four students were recognized for their research, one receiving an award for first place and three receiving an award for second place.
First place was awarded to Haining Wang, for his presentation, “Science Out of Its Ivory Tower: Improving Scholarship Accessibility with Reinforcement Learning.” This presentation focused on a common challenge in science communication: much of the scholarship is inaccessible to the general public because of jargon and complex language. Haining’s research introduced a reinforcement learning framework that edits a language model to rewrite scholarly abstracts into something easier to understand. The rewritten abstracts generated by this model could be comprehended by middle school students, while maintaining both factual integrity and high-quality language. He envisions this research as progress in bridging the gap between scholarly research and the public, particularly for younger readers and those without a college degree.
Second place was awarded to the following three students for their respective presentations:
Gordon Amidu, “Political Trolling and Religion in Ghana,” which focuses on a study addressing the gap in literature on political trolling in Ghana’s social media landscape. This study specifically investigated how religion, political discourse, and trolling intersect in Ghana’s digital political landscape, and how this contributes to an understanding of online political communication in Ghanian democratic discourse.
Alex Wingate, “Early Modern Metadata Standards: Book Description in Navarrese Inventories,” which explores the possibility that a book description standard existed between booksellers in Navarre, Spain as early at the 16th or 17th century. The study analyzed TEI-encoded inventories of books from this period, and preliminary evidence suggests that a rough standard did exist among booksellers for what metadata should be used to describe a book and how to refer to works and authors.
Yueru Yan, “Hardship streamers in live crowdfunding,” which presented an analysis of the TikTok clips and sales data of fourteen male and female hardship streamers, or streamers who raise funds to ameliorate personal hardships by selling commodities and receiving virtual gifts. The study explored how the streamers facilitated interactivity and authenticity and compared the differences between male and female streamers to provide a unique understanding of the effectiveness of self-presentation strategies. 