“The ability to remember is a form of power.”
This quote by author and theorist bell hooks was emblazoned across cards given to everyone who attended February’s . It was a reminder that the work of collecting, preserving and envisioning information has power that reverberates beyond the halls of academia, beyond even a lifetime.
Tracie D. Hall convened the Symposium as part of her Distinguished Practitioner in Residence role at the University of Washington Information School. Invoking the work of hooks, Seattle author Octavia Butler, and Black librarians and information workers past and present, Hall set the stage for the three-day event. Having served in library and arts leadership roles nationally and abroad, including as the executive director of the American Library Association, Hall is no stranger to bringing groups of people together with a purpose.
“I think convening is one of the most important acts of scholarship and community building,” Hall said. “I’ve convened because I wanted to ask a series of questions and to see how others might answer them and what we might learn from those answers, and also what we might learn from the kinds of people that actually come together in inquiry.”
The Symposium invited a variety of interdisciplinary — or as one presenter put it, anti-disciplinary — fields of study and practice. and 200 attendees came from Harlem; Atlanta; Tuskegee, Ala.; Hawai’i; Indiana; Birmingham, England; a large contingent from Chicago; and other areas to take part in the inaugural event Feb. 21-23. The provided financial and logistical support.
The concept of Black Information Futures, also the name of a course that Hall teaches, draws inspiration from the artist Alisha Wormsley, among other sources. Wormsley has exhibited large-scale signage inviting conversation with the phrase, “,” reminding viewers of the ongoing presence of Black people, even where gentrification, redlining and other means have altered communities.
Hall assembled a curatorial planning team that included adult literacy specialist Kimberly Crutcher; library leader Makiba Foster; technology training expert Christa V. Hardy; MLIS students Sarah Harris and Erica Owan; Information School Assistant Professor and art historian Temi Odumosu; Steven Fullwood of the ; preservation historian and consultant Jada Jones; and renowned scholar Angela D.R. Smith. The curators met last summer in Montgomery, Ala., the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement.
For Hall’s students, the Symposium offered a special opportunity to connect with leaders in the field. Owan pursued an independent study with Hall and took on Symposium program management duties.
“I had the honor to be on the curatorial team, and it was incredible,” said Harris, whom Hall invited to join the team after she took her Black Information Futures course. “Just to know the amount of papers, projects, presentations, the amount of work that is happening in this space that hadn't been collected together before — it’s a huge opportunity.”
The Symposium planners took steps to make the event as accessible as possible, hosting over both weekend and weekday dates, making registration free, and including presenters from a variety of professions and lived experience in the lineup.
“The curatorial team was really conscious and intentional about bringing in people who are not only traditional librarians or archivists,” Harris said, “but bringing in artists and family archivists and memory keepers, and workers and professors, journalists, people who maybe wouldn't be considered information professionals in the traditional way we think about it, but who are really contributing to information management, information collection and information memory. Those panels were some of my favorites.”
The gathering included sessions in three campus buildings, with the final day at the Kelly Cultural Theater. Laughter, music and poetry were shared side-by-side with in-depth archival research and critical inquiry.
Sessions included unique aspects of Black information research and preservation work. They addressed how Black newspapers and magazines, family homes, libraries, land and bodies all inform Black information studies. Presenters spoke about topics including reproductive justice and an under-acknowledgement of Black birth workers in historic records; the effects of disinvestment in Black communities, and approaches for repair; and the importance of cultural heritage sites and curated online platforms such as Blacksky.
“Black space is both analog, physical space, as well as digital,” Hall said. “Digital space is mirroring contemporary discourse in terms of anti-Blackness, minimalization and erasure. How do we support not only Black survival, but also Black agency in the future? That's the whole goal of this convening.”
Speakers shared stories of resilience in the face of exploitation and erasures. Presenters from Texas spoke about how they pursued creative funding solutions to partner with accessibility groups to update the , which hosts one of the region’s most significant archival collections.
Time was a frequent theme throughout the presentations. Presenters spoke about the importance of learning from the past, innovating in the future, and sharing wisdom with younger generations. Many presenters emphasized the importance of mentorship in their work, both for teaching and for encouraging young people to consider careers in libraries, museums, archives and other information fields.
“What would it be like for us to gather again in a decade?” Odumosu asked the audience, inviting reflection on the future.
Asked what she wanted participants to take away from the Symposium, Hall said, “I want them to be not only enriched by the experience, but I want them to be awed, as I am, by some of the scholars who are coming together. This is really like Mount Kilimanjaro descending on the campus.”
Information School alumni presenters, in addition to Hall, included Mei’lani Eyre (MLIS ’23), Twanna Hodge (MLIS '15), Jainaba Jawara (INFO ’24) and Beth Patin (Ph.D. ’20). Patin spoke about how Black people have had to be extraordinarily resourceful in their information seeking — including in her own family. She shared that her grandfather sought information through course catalogs, working around segregation and refusing to let the discriminatory system limit his future. Patin connected her ancestor’s experience to the concept she has developed of epistemicide, the erasure of marginalized knowledge systems.
Many of the presenters are widely recognized as leaders in their areas. Joy Bivins is the director of the in New York; and Kelvin Watson, Executive Director of the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District, was recently named 2026 . Tonika Lewis Johnson was selected as a 2025 MacArthur Fellow for her community-based art and mapping work.
In the “Black Spatial Futures” panel, Johnson spoke about her projects including , which details the exploitation of Black Chicagoans through land sale contracts, a deceptive practice that led Black homeowners to believe they had mortgages that were in fact just leases. The project includes identifying homes that were under land sale contracts and placing markers in front of them to share information and memorialize the homeowners who were scammed out of earning equity on the properties. The project also involves beautifying those homes and land today.
The connections between art, data and libraries showed up in the records as well.
When visiting the archive at Newbury Library as part of her research process, Johnson listened to oral histories of Black Chicagoans. In the process, she learned that the library had been named for a real estate mogul who was himself likely involved in selling land sale contracts. Libraries are not removed from these issues, she said. Without her research at the library, Lewis Johnson would not have known about that connection.
“This is the critical importance of you all, and the work that you do,” Johnson told Symposium attendees. “Creatives and culture workers like myself rely on you all transferring that information to us so that we can transfer it to the larger public.
“Please remain inspired and hopeful,” she said.
You can engage with more perspectives on the inaugural Black Information Futures Symposium using on social media.
Pictured at top; KaLyn Coghill, Vincent Hall, Tonika Lewis Johnson and Amahra Spence take part in a panel of presentations on Feb. 23.