Dan Grace

Information School

PhD researcher

dpgrace1@sheffield.ac.uk

Regent Court (IS)

Full contact details

Dan Grace
Information School
Regent Court (IS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP

Profile

Dan is part of the Libraries and information society research group.

PhD project

Title: "Creating a convivial library: crisis, the commons and community resilience."

We live in a time of intertwined economic, environmental, and political crises. This project seeks to understand what place a library has in addressing these crises.

It comprises an autoethnographic account of the praxis of creating a convivial library. The project seeks to investigate this process of praxis (the flow from theory to practice and back again) through my own attempts to realise a convivial library in Sheffield.

Specifically, the theoretical perspectives engaged with are primarily drawn from the work of Ivan Illich on convivial institutions and the commons, and Jason W. Moore's work on world-ecology.

Supervisors

Andrew Cox

Jo Bates

Research interests

Public libraries
Convivial tools
Information as a commons
Theories of knowledge/information
Critical theory
World-ecology
Marxism
Anarchism

Funding and awards

WRoCAH PhD studentship

Publications

Journal articles

Grace D & Sen B (2013) Community Resilience and the Role of the Public Library. Library Trends, 61(3), 513-541. View this article in WRRO

Chapters

Webber SA, Andrews P, Chapman E, Elmore J, Grace D & Nunn E (2018) Reflections on Running a critLIS Reading Group In Nicholson KP & Seale M (Ed.), The Politics of Theory and the Practice of Critical Librarianship (pp. 167-179). Sacramento: Library Juice Press. View this article in WRRO
Grace D (2014) Reading for a Better Future: Books For A Better Future (BFABF) and Sustainability Literacy in a U.K. Public Library In Morrone M (Ed.), Informed Agitation: Library and Information Skills in Social Justice Movements and Beyond (pp. 45-54). Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.

Conference proceedings papers

Grace D (2014) Illich in the library: putting theory into practice. https://conferencepapers.shef.ac.uk/index.php/iFutures/2014/schedConf/presentations. The University of Sheffield, 22 July 2014 - 22 July 2014. View this article in WRRO