Building Community Is Knowledge Work: A Relational Approach for CSU Libraries

Academic libraries frequently frame community building through programming, outreach initiatives, and student engagement activities. While these efforts are valuable, they often leave underlying knowledge frameworks unchanged. Many knowledge traditions, including Indigenous, communal, and relational epistemologies, understand knowledge not primarily as an individual achievement but as something produced through relationships, context, and lived experience. This poster explores how academic libraries participate in shaping which forms of knowledge are recognized, organized, and made visible. Drawing on interpretivist and relational perspectives in information studies, the poster considers how library practices, including research consultations, information literacy instruction, and collection development, can either reproduce dominant epistemic assumptions or open space for relational approaches to knowledge. Using examples from academic library practice, the poster introduces the concept of relational librarianship as an approach to community building grounded in care, context, and epistemic inclusion. Rather than treating community as an external audience to be engaged, relational librarianship recognizes that knowledge infrastructures themselves shape who feels recognized and welcomed within academic spaces, including academic library spaces. This work invites CSU library practitioners to consider how community building in CSU libraries is also a form of knowledge work, one that requires attention to relationality, cultural context, and multiple knowledge traditions.