Books for and in schools are commodities. They form a central part of the political economy of publishing. They are also, profoundly, sites of cultural and ideological conflict. While always there, there are periods when these economic and ideological conflicts are even more powerful. This is just such a time. This reality asks us to also examine…

Teachers want their students to have access to the books they need to fall in love with reading, which means having classroom and school libraries stocked with a wide variety of books. But as English teachers are well aware, Texas leads the nation in book challenges and bans. This article defines and describes the different forms of censorship and…

A plethora of studies on the decentering and decolonializing knowledge construction and production in global academic writing and publishing has ineluctably cast important light on how Euro-Western-centric hegemonic knowledge is preserved and perpetuated in the academia, often leading to detrimental consequences for non-Anglophones researchers and…

Book banning and censorship is appearing again in states and school districts. The history of book banning goes back as far as recorded time. Columnist Jonathan E. Collins discusses the U.S. court system's history support of the First Amendment and against censorship. He outlines the implications of the most recent book banning incidents and the…

This article examines the relationship between academic freedom and authoritarianism in Turkey. While not a new problem in the Turkish context, academic freedom has come particularly under attack following the attempted military coup on 15 July 2016, as well as with the Turkish intervention in the Syrian conflict. This paper is focused on scholars…

Offering insights from a research-practice partnership, we examine how five pre-K-6 teachers discussed using LGBTQ+-inclusive children's literature as backup to counter curricular censorship and community pushback.

Teaching literacy skills through high-quality trade books that provide diverse cultural perspectives is increasingly difficult due to challenges to teachers' book selections. To meet their professional responsibilities, teachers must select literature they judge effective for developing students' awareness and understanding of others'…

Theodore Taylor's "The Cay" received a great deal of criticism upon its publication in 1969 for its racism, yet it has remained in American public school curricula for over fifty years. Defenders of the novel have argued that it advocates for color-blindness, a position that has helped entrench it in schools. Meanwhile, few critics have…

Parents and guardians are uniquely positioned to help their children succeed in school. When it comes to the educational interests and needs of an individual child, it is difficult to think of anyone who is a stronger advocate than a parent. But what happens when a parent's views of that individual child's interests and needs conflict with the…

Fisting is a sexual practice that is almost always left out of sex and sexuality education. It elicits strong reactions, both from practitioners who describe it as a highly pleasurable, safe, and even spiritual activity, and from critics and clinicians who condemn it as dangerous. Fisting has attracted little scholarly attention but has ignited…

As a school librarian, the author has paid close attention to legislation and book banning efforts across the United States over the past few years. Because their focus had been on school libraries, they hadn't really thought about censorship and book banning efforts in public libraries. After speaking out at a library board meeting, the author…

Purpose: Artificial intelligence (AI) has become increasingly important and influential in reading and writing. The influx of social media digital spaces, like TikTok, has also shifted the ways multimodal composition takes place alongside AI. This study aims to argue that within spaces like TikTok, human composers must attend to the ways they…

This article reports on the results of a mixed-methods survey of 152 self-selecting Muslim university students sampled across a range of higher education institutions across the UK in late 2019. The study explores perceptions of the impact of the new Prevent Duty among UK Muslim students, especially concerning questions of self-censorship and…

This study explores the link between knowledge and skills related to online information consumption and implications for fake news beliefs and support for censorship. The goal of this project was to explore the link between media instruction and students' news beliefs and attitudes. In particular, survey participants were asked about fake news…

In this paper, I criticize two recent and influential arguments for no-platforming advanced by Robert Simpson and Amia Srinivasan and by Neil Levy, respectively. What both arguments have in common is their attempt to reconcile no-platforming with liberal values. For Simpson and Srinivasan, no-platforming does not contradict liberalism if grounded…