Alison Brown
Lecturer
Email: alisonbrown@dal.ca
Research Clusters:
- Educational and informational services (children's services, collaboration, community engagement, community-led services, pleasure reading, reading and literacy, mediated information searching)
- Human information interaction (group/collaborative information interactions, information needs and behaviours)
- Information and society (books for children and teens, ethics, information policy, information society, informed civic engagement)
Education:
- BAH (Queen's University)
- MLIS (Dalhousie University)
Overview:
Sometimes, the path toward teaching library and information science includes sea turtles, social justice educators in Toronto, community journalists in Vancouver, feminist Kenyan lawyers, street-involved youth in Thailand, and enormously supportive family and friends. I am so happy to bring what I’ve experienced and learned around the world to the work I do here at the Department of Information Science at Dalhousie.
Alongside teaching at DIS, I am an Interdisciplinary PhD student, studying how bringing people together to read aloud and discuss literature can strengthen relational wellbeing and build social inclusion in our diverse communities. This builds on my MLIS thesis work that explored the outcomes of a shared reading program for incarcerated mothers and their families. My teaching and research interests include community-led services, the sociology of reading, services and resources for children and young adults, and information experience. When not at work, I take long walks, make jam, curl up with books, and seek sunshine with family and friends.