Peter Cruickshank (very much lead author) and I are delighted that our paper An information literacy lens on community representation for participatory budgeting in Brazil is now published. Check it out on the Journal of Information Literacy’s website or Edinburgh Napier University’s repository[1]. Also check out Peter’s post on the Social Informatics research group blog.

Here’s the ‘findings’ and ‘future work’ parts of the abstract: 

This paper presents an evaluation of the information literacies used by community representatives when engaging with participatory budgeting in São Paulo City, Brazil. It was found that community representatives face informational barriers to their engagement with participatory budgeting, in (a) learning about their role (b) understanding the information needs of the communities served and (c) gathering and sharing information about local issues with stakeholders. 

These findings allow the refining of CILIP’s definition of information literacy[2] for citizenship and provide the basis for proposing a model for the IL of community representatives. It is also proposed that future information literacy research could further develop the role of digitally-enabled place and community in shaping the landscape of literacy and the role of hyperlocal representation. Additionally, the role of translation in cross-lingual IL research is considered.

(Cruickshank & Ryan, 2023)

So there are plenty of potential research directions there! It’s cool to be spoilt for choice, $funding(deity) willing, of course.

Meanwhile, another point of this post is to record the happy ending to this academic publishing saga. I want to acknowledge the support of Journal of Information Literacy in the publishing process. Also, readers might be interested in my posts from São Paulo in 2019, where Wegene and I undertook the fieldwork at the heart of the paper. 

Finally, I want to thank our Brazilian hosts for welcoming us to their worlds, and Napier for funding the fieldtrip from its Global Challenges Research Fund award.

Reference and notes

Cruickshank, P., & Ryan, B. (2023). An information literacy lens on community representation for participatory budgeting in Brazil. Journal of Information Literacy, 17(2), 46-68. https://doi.org/10.11645/17.2.5

[1] Journal of Information Literacy is Diamond open access, so anyone with an internet connection can read its articles for free.

[2] from https://infolit.org.uk/ILdefinitionCILIP2018.pdf, ‘Information literacy is the ability to think critically and make balanced judgements about any information we find and use. It empowers us as citizens to reach and express informed views and to engage fully with society.’