How do we write about this?: Reflections on scholarship about immigrants, data literacy, surveillance, and academic freedom in 2025
In brief
How do you write about immigrants, surveillance, and data literacy at a time when the political landscape around you is constantly shifting, immigrants are being targeted, and higher education is under threat? This question surfaced for us as we were writing an article for Library Trends in 2025 as a non-faculty doctoral student and a non-faculty academic librarian. This article explores the intersection of our personal experience in exercising our academic freedoms and the wider history and context of intellectual freedom in academia. As we worked on our Library Trends article, we confronted questions about our privileges and responsibilities, our concerns about safety, and fighting against self-censorship that grows out of the chilling effect of political pressures on justice-centered scholarship. We suggest risk management considerations and make an argument that collaborative writing can serve as one tool for resistance and empowerment when confronted with these challenges as librarians and library and information science scholars.
By Hayley Park and Negeen Aghassibake
Background
Writing about politically charged topics of the time forces scholars to weigh not only the costs and benefits of their work but also to consider risk management. Yet, what readers end up seeing is the published outcome, and rarely the decision-making process that scholars must navigate to get there. We recently wrote a Library Trends publication titled “Empowering Immigrant Library Users Through Personal Data Literacy Programming in U.S. Public Libraries” (Park & Aghassibake, 2026), which sheds light on the impact of data surveillance on immigrants’ safety and recommends that public libraries play an active role in personal data literacy programming where possible. As we wrote the article during the first year of Donald Trump’s second presidency, we had to consider the meaning and boundaries of academic freedom and intellectual freedom, along with questions around safety and potential risks amidst intensified anti-immigrant rhetoric.
This paper provides insight into the academic publication process, but it primarily contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversations around academic freedom in a time of anti-immigrant rhetoric and continued critical engagement in promoting library values and advocacy work. We argue that collaborative writing can serve as a form of resistance and a way to contend with uncertainty that enables scholars to critically engage in the process of navigating tensions, identifying values and power dynamics, and being vulnerable.
Key terms
For clarity, we offer descriptions of how we’re using related and often conflated terms. Academic freedom has a wide range of definitions across legal, political, and cultural contexts (Nelson, 2009). When we use the term “academic freedom,” we are largely aligning with the United Kingdom Education Reform Act of 1988 definition from Section 202 that refers to academics’ right to pursue research and lines of inquiry “without placing themselves in jeopardy of losing their jobs or privileges they may have at their institutions” (Education Reform Act 1988). We expand upon this definition to include freedom from institutional interference in academic activities with the purpose of reducing academic freedom.
We recognize that this definition varies from the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) that specifies academic freedom for faculty (1940). However, we are also in alignment with the following assertion in the AAUP Joint Statement on Faculty Status of College and University Librarians that recognizes academic librarians as members of the academic community and their need for academic freedom to conduct their work (American Association of University Professors, 1972): “Academic freedom is indispensable to librarians in their roles as teachers and researchers…as members of the academic community, librarians should have latitude in the exercise of their professional judgment within the library…” This also aligns with the ACRL Standards for Academic Librarians Without Faculty Status that says that “Academic Librarians are entitled to the protection of academic freedom” (Association of College & Research Libraries, 2011). Later in this article, we will discuss uneven protections of academic freedom for non-faculty academics in greater detail.
When we use the term “intellectual freedom,” we are generally referring to “the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction” (Garnar et al., 2022, p. 300). Intellectual freedom and academic freedom are related, though distinct, terms. Within our framework, academic freedom requires intellectual freedom to exist and is specific to institutions within the academy, whereas intellectual freedom is not restricted to academic life and applies to public life.
We also use the term “chilling effect” throughout this article. The definition we’re following here is based on Jonathan W. Penney’s explanation of chilling effect: “when a person, deterred by fear of some legal punishment or privacy harm, engages in self-censorship, that is, censors themselves and does not speak or engage in some activity, despite that activity being lawful or even desirable” (2022, pp. 1454-1455). As an example, within the context of this article, that could look like a researcher deciding not to pursue a politically charged research question due to a fear of harm to their career.
Another word that we refer to throughout this article is “safety.” When we use this word in this article, what we mean is safety from repercussions from our institutions and safety from impacts to our positions from within and outside of our institutions for exercising our academic freedom. This is not to say that we are opposed to critiques or debates, and as noted in the AAUP’s 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure, we recognize that “the public may judge [our] profession and [our] institution[s] by [our] utterances” (1940). Rather, it is the acknowledgment that fear of reprisal, such as job loss, and harm, such as stalking and individualized threats, has a chilling effect on academic freedom.
Setting the scene: writing in 2025
As we worked on our Library Trends article, the implementation of anti-immigration-related policies resulted in a stream of news covering the arrests of immigrants. In the educational context, attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in higher education also led academic institutions to modify their language and programs, if not entirely remove DEI initiatives and positions, following Executive Order 14151, “Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing” (The White House, 2025a).
In fact, several institutions of higher education, including Brown University, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia, among many more, agreed to Trump’s priority funding offer for accepting the compact that effectively threatens academic freedom and intellectual freedom on campus (Uglesbee et al., 2025).
Additionally, the library world was shocked when the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) was shut down by Executive Order 14217 (“Commencing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy”) in February 2025 (The White House, 2025b), and its future remains uncertain (Landgraf, 2026). In this rapidly changing context, as a new PhD student, Hayley had to consider whether she could continue conducting immigrant-centered research. Most directly, the immediate suspension of the IMLS grant that funded her work meant the potential suspension of her salary. In addition, DEI-related terms and programs were targeted at public institutions, colleges and universities (Kim, 2025). Negeen felt the impact directly when an individual involved with anti-DEI organizations asked for her and her organization to be disciplined as a result of a program that she led.
The Trump administration released a list of more than 250 words deemed unacceptable in 2025, and the word “immigrants” takes space in the forbidden word list (Connelly, 2025). Assigning appropriate, representative keywords to a work is critical. There has been a record of information science literature emphasizing this point, from the classification aspect to developing a scholarly identity (Bowker & Starr, 1999; Inouye & McAlpine, 2019). This means that banning words such as “immigrants,” “advocacy,” and “equity” directly impede not only the effective discovery of a work but also the production and documentation of knowledge that enriches the scholarship on a topic.
Additionally, not being able to use specific words related to groups of people leads to an inability to discuss the harms that impact those groups. Political controversy can impede scientific research, leading to varying levels of self-censorship, from removing controversial words from research projects to leaving academia for an external position with greater job security (Kempner, 2009). In fact, drawing the direct parallel between Trump’s ban of seven ‘forbidden words’ from Center for Disease Control (CDC) during his first presidency — “vulnerable, entitlement, diversity, transgender, fetus, evidence-based, and science-based” (Sun & Eilperin, 2017), and the 2025 list (Connelly, 2025), Kronk and her colleagues analyzed the estimated impact of the government-imposed restriction of scientific language and found that the state and funder requirement of the removal of specific scientific terms could not only jeopardize research integrity as well as the communication of the findings (Kronk et al., 2025). Within the field of information, Kate Starbird, a Professor at the University of Washington who specializes in how information circulates in online spaces, has shared her personal account of being the subject of online harassment, her concerns about her and her team’s safety, and witnessing a chilling effect because of her scholarship on online mis-and disinformation related to the U.S. election (Starbird, 2023). Following the logic used by UC San Diego public health scientist Rebecca Fielding-Miller in an article about forbidden words (Sharma, 2025), if we are unable to use the word “immigrants” in our research, then we are unable to discuss the harms inflicted by the federal government on immigrants.
This move has forced scholars and institutions to reconsider their research directions and programs, leading to anticipatory self-censorship (The Lancet, 2025). This censorship of “‘disapproved subjects’” has led to a chilling effect on academics that has lasted well beyond the implementation of these restricted words (Blinder, 2026).
In this context, we had to take into consideration the changing political landscape affecting the conditions of our scholarly activities while writing about data and immigrants in libraries.
Positionality and privilege
We approached this experience and this subject with considerable privilege, given our positionalities. Hayley is a PhD student at a major research university, and Negeen is an academic librarian with permanent status at a different large research university. Both Hayley and Negeen generate scholarship in some form in order to progress in their careers. Hayley has some specific protections for graduate students as part of the University of Maryland (University of Maryland, n.d.), and Negeen has protections under Article 61 of the “Collective Bargaining Agreement By and Between the University of Washington and the Service Employees International Union Local 925 for Professional Libraries and Press Employees and Librarians” (2023). However, during the actual writing process, the application and the limits of these terms weren’t clear, as discussed in greater detail in the section below.
In addition, we are both women of color working at public institutions at a time when DEI-related activities in higher education are being scrutinized, and Hayley identifies as an immigrant working in this space at a time when immigrants are being targeted and attacked. We had to ask ourselves questions such as: What are the risks in writing this article? Can we weather those risks given our privileges? Are there risks we cannot see at the moment? Who may be surveilling our work? What is our responsibility given the privileges we do have? Are we overthinking this?
We experienced the tensions of these equally true realities and felt conflicting senses of vulnerability and privilege throughout the process of writing the original article and this one. We felt that one way to bring this conflict to the surface was through further collaborative reflection and writing. These conversations also helped us in our attempts to demystify academic freedom for ourselves and to consider the practical implications of exercising that freedom, given our positionalities.
In addition to the questions we asked above, we also uncovered questions related to how academic freedom applies to library workers across the field. Neither of us are faculty, and much of the language we found as we explored the literature on academic freedom related directly to faculty. Leebaw and Logsdon (2020) argue that academic freedom, in the context of academic librarians, needs further research. According to them, non-faculty academic librarians do not experience the same level of protection as faculty with tenure, and that one’s financial security and social identity impact their perception of their protection. This lack of a perception of safety and protection (as a result of not being faculty) potentially contributes to the chilling effect that some librarians may experience.
Throughout our research, the conclusion we came to is that the state of academic freedom for academic librarians is inconsistent across the field and institution-specific. Negeen’s union’s collective bargaining agreement (a legally binding contract), for instance, ensures academic freedom not only for librarians in the union, but also for non-librarian staff in the union:
The University of Washington recognizes Librarians’ and Libraries and Press professionals’ right to academic freedom and the right to examine and communicate ideas by any lawful means, even if such activities should generate hostility or pressure against the Librarians, Professional Libraries and Press employees, or the University (Collective Bargaining Agreement SEIU 925 UW Libraries and Press Union, 2023).
University of California librarians also won academic freedom rights in their collective bargaining agreement (Carrillo, 2019), whereas “academic freedom” is not mentioned in the Northwestern University Library union contract (Collective Bargaining Agreement Between Service Employees International Union, Local No. 73 and Northwestern University, 2023).
The status of academic freedom for PhD students is similarly inconsistent and unclear. While Hayley was unable to find academic freedom protections that directly applied to her, she did find academic freedom protections for University of Maryland School of Law students (and librarians) specifically: “Our commitment to academic freedom extends to all members of the law school community. We recognize the need for academic freedom for students and teachers, in their, at times overlapping, roles as scholars, educators, clinicians, administrators and librarians” (University of Maryland Francis King Carey School of Law, n.d.).
Chick (2025) finds that PhD students felt their academic freedom was under attack, especially when their topics were related to DEI issues. PhD students were being placed in a unique position of choosing between their commitment to equity and professional and academic risks. Chick further observes the doctoral students’ self-censorship as a consequence of the chilling effect of external threats to DEI initiatives and academic freedom in the context of educational innovation at Hispanic-serving institutions. Doerfler et al. (2021) also documented the experiences of scholars who have faced Internet-facilitated harassment, including doxxing, Zoom-bombing, and threats to funding cuts. Given the abundance of evidence in the literature, as well as our own anecdotal experiences, we knew we had to be thoughtful in how we made decisions.
Problem statement and significance
Scholarship on intellectual freedom and censorship under political and institutional pressure has a long history in LIS scholarship and practice. Yet, during our publication process, we found limited guidance on how to engage in academic writing about a topic that might be perceived as politically charged.
While Negeen has the protections in her union’s Collective Bargaining Agreement mentioned above (Collective Bargaining Agreement SEIU 925 UW Libraries and Press Union, 2023), the article suggests some limitations to those protections: “The expression of dissent and the attempt to produce change may not be carried out in ways that…disrupt the work of other University personnel.” The question of what is “disruptive” is undefined. Negeen was also unable to find specific guidance about how the university responds to threats to academic freedom, whether internally within the university or externally from the general public or government. This lack of clarity led to feelings of uncertainty about the boundaries of her academic freedom.
For Hayley, understanding the clear boundaries of her academic freedom was both straightforward and ambiguous. While the University of Maryland grants academic freedom as part of its intellectual freedom principle to all campus members, including students (University of Maryland, n.d.), there was no dedicated institutional document detailing how it applies to doctoral students, who operate in researcher, student, and teaching roles depending on funding and acceptance package, or the extent of protection and representation the university provides.
Similarly, while the AAUP provides a document on academic freedom and tenure that could be interpreted as extending protection to students in their learning, the scope and application of the agreement remain unclear (American Association of University Professors, 1940). This lack of clarity and practical guidance is further reflected in the absence of official institutional documents on this topic, from PhD orientation or doctoral program policy at the Graduate School level. This leaves doctoral students in a state of uncertainty as they exercise their intellectual freedom, navigate risks, and also complete their doctoral programs.
Some specific areas in need of further guidance include selecting publication venues, determining project scope, and author visibility to demystify the extension of author protection and academic freedom given to LIS PhD students and academic librarians, the detailed accounts of which we had difficulty locating in existing LIS literature. In response to this gap, and in the spirit of peer-sharing, we offer our decision-making process that shaped our topic selection, contextual scope, and the level of visibility we assumed as authors, including selecting venues and considering our safety (e.g., understanding potential threats, having a clearer sense of how institutional policies could be helpful or harmful) when advocating for immigrant rights, especially from perspectives of others in our academic (but not faculty) positions.
Our aim is to help other library scholars facing similar challenges think through the implications of exercising their freedoms and make informed decisions based on their own professional and personal circumstances. Our self-reflexive account of the immigrant-centered writing process contributes to the broader scholarship on academic freedom but also adds to the growing accounts of the lived experiences of library workers in navigating challenging political environments. In the following paragraphs, we will outline our publication experience, discuss issues of academic freedom and intellectual safety (especially in relation to intersectional identities and institutional privileges), and argue that collaborative writing is one form of resistance.
Context and timelines
The anti-immigrant policies around the time of our writing of the Library Trends article led to our discussions about academic freedom, which inspired the basis of this article. We submitted our Library Trends proposal in mid-December 2024, before Donald Trump took office, and our proposal broadly focused on data literacy programming for immigrants in public libraries, with some focus on privacy. We received notice of its acceptance on January 6, 2025, during a transitional period between the 2024 presidential election and the inauguration scheduled on January 20, 2026. When we began the actual writing process, Trump was inaugurated into the office, and on his first day, he signed about 34 immigration-related policies, 27 of which he revived from his first term, and seven additional policies (Roesenberg et al., 2025).
We recognized that the political and social context around immigration had shifted, and we realized that our initial conception of an article about data literacy programming for immigrants through public libraries with only a minimal focus on privacy was no longer sufficient. Rather, we needed to expand the focus to also include advocacy as well as personal data literacy as the foundation of privacy literacy against surveillance. For example, rather than conceptualizing data literacy as a necessary skill to better understand areas such as financial literacy and entrepreneurship, we recognized the emerging and more urgent need to make more accessible how personal data could be used against immigrants – for example, through programming that allows users to think through the implications of location sharing in mobile apps. This also included a shift from just thinking about programming to considering if and how advocacy plays a role in this work. We discussed the need to redirect some attention to contextualizing our recommendations in the history of advocacy in libraries and the recognition of increased surveillance of scholars and the general public, reflecting the historical and professional parallels in the rapidly changing political environment.
Our writing process spanned the entirety of 2025, with revisions and source updates responding to news and policy changes. The timeline of current events was closely intertwined with our publication timeline, prompting us to reflect on the challenges of writing about immigrant advocacy in academia amid a divisive political context. The article was published in February 2026.
Emerging concerns: Academic freedom and safety
Throughout the writing process, we confronted emerging concerns from the shifting political and social climate. These concerns forced us to face the public nature of our work, which also instilled a conflicting sense of both vulnerability and a renewed commitment to LIS values and led us to consider the issues around academic writing, its consequences, and the risks associated with it. Banning specific language, pressure on institutions, and threats to personal safety lead to a physical and psychological condition of a chilling effect in academia. Schauer (1978) discusses concerns over threats and safety, vulnerability, deciding when and how to speak about a topic. Initially conceived as a legal framework, Schauer captures the affective factors related to legal uncertainty, especially in relation to the exercise of First Amendment rights. The chilling effect here results in the avoidance of exercising one’s rightful freedom of speech due to fear of or uncertainty around potential legal consequences. Despite our best efforts, we often came up against the chilling effect and had to be intentional about not censoring ourselves in our writing and conversations.
Challenges against academic freedom are not new. What is common in these repeated challenges is a thread of patterns that shape and oppress the conditions of academic activities. Nelson (2009) outlines several threats to academic freedom, including authoritarian administration, unwarranted research oversight, political intolerance, legal threats, and claims of financial crisis. Many of these constructs describe the current sociopolitical landscape under the Trump administration, as discussed in this article. Threats against academics and their scholarly activities can be so severe that there are dedicated organizations such as the Scholars at Risk Network that provide support to those scholars globally (Adebayo, 2022).
One example in the United States is that of the experiences of Ricardo Dominguez, Professor of New Media, Performance Art, and a Principal Investigator at CALIT2 at the University of California, San Diego. Dominguez found himself at the center of the immigration and academic freedom debate for creating Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was a mobile application that was designed to help migrants find water caches and access and read poems. Dominguez was investigated for a potential misuse of funds and was under threat of termination from his position following pressure from three Republican members of Congress (Dominguez, 2014). The investigation found no evidence of a misuse of funds and he did not lose his job. However, this example illustrates how a work of academic and artistic expression can be used to try to criminalize a scholar, and how political and ideological differences (specifically anti-immigrant sentiments) can lead to attacks on scholars (Warren & Warren, 2011). These types of attacks on academic freedom and scholars’ livelihoods force scholars to negotiate between continuing their research and balancing real threats to individual and professional safety.
Decision-making process
To make informed decisions, we engaged in a collaborative assessment of our situation that involved discussions about scope and approach to writing, consultation with the editorial team and mentors, and regular team conversations to check in about our concerns.
Project scope and capturing the moment
As we worked on our article, we encountered a significant issue: an increasing number of news reports related to our topic, which raised concerns about academic freedom and intellectual safety. To begin, we had to decide the extent to which we wanted to document the current moment. Situating our inquiry in the current context that continued to unfold forced us to think about the relevance of not just the connection to our arguments for personal data literacy programming in public libraries, but also the details of the political conditions that continue the thread of advocacy in the history of libraries. Ultimately, we decided that we could not discuss non-citizen immigrants and personal data without also documenting current events. The decision to capture the current moment led to a discussion about source citing.
This led to more questions. The year 2025 was marked by political, legal, and policy shifts. Many cases that were in the news were still developing, and we would read updates as they progressed. It was difficult to get to a point where we felt like we could stop updating our literature review. We had cited cases that were, as of that moment, unresolved and still shifting. While the purpose was to situate our article within our specific context, it was hard to resist the temptation of a closure that we knew would never come. Ultimately, remembering the purpose of providing this background information (and quickly approaching deadlines) allowed us to pause.
Additionally, we believed it was important to capture the moment we found ourselves in through a less-than-traditional literature review and background that included newspaper articles and grey literature (such as reports from government agencies, policies from corporations, and presidential Executive Orders). We believed it was important to provide the context in which we were writing our article, and we also wanted to contribute to preserving this snapshot in the scholarly record. Given the likelihood that a news event as well as its source we referred to in the article would most likely change, we employed a few strategies to maintain the rigor of the publication. First, we made sure to include information about the specific time period that the writing took place in the narrative, along with an acknowledgement that the current landscape would likely look meaningfully different before even the final publication date. We also took snapshots of many sources by capturing their webpages using the Wayback Machine in case they are modified or taken down. Our hope was to maintain an accurate description of the context at the time of writing against the increasing instances of data and information erasure.
Risk assessment
Writing about advocacy and social justice and the exercising of intellectual freedom is one of the strengths of our field. Given the challenges against scholars at the time of writing, we had to consider the boundaries of exercising our intellectual freedom within our academic and institutional settings, especially given the public nature of our work. Other scholars have also felt compelled to change the direction of their work due to the threats of damaging emails or online bullying. Attacks following scholarly activities are also not unheard of in libraries.
In 2019, Professor Nicole Cooke and librarian Amy Koester hosted a conference called Defeating Bullies and Trolls in the Library: Developing Strategies to Protect our Rights and Personhood at the Skokie Public Library in Illinois. The conference featured several library scholars including Nicole Cooke, Stacy Collins, Kristin Lansdown, Amy Koester, Dianae Foote, Emily Knox, Jamie Naidoo, and Aimee Strittmatter, who spoke about bullying and harassment at both personal and institutional levels (Peet, 2019). This conference was built off of a panel discussion titled “Bullying, Trolling, and Doxxing, Oh My! Protecting our Advocacy and Public Discourse around Diversity and Social Justice,” which took place at the 2018 American Library Association Annual Conference in New Orleans and discussed library workers’ experiences of being bullied. While on that panel, Cooke and Miriam Sweeney specifically shared their experience with being harassed after Campus Reform (a conservative news source that covers higher education) published an article about their research on microaggressions in libraries (Peet, 2018).
Most recently, Oltmann and Dowell (2025) released a piece analyzing Professor Watchlist, a project created by the conservative organization Turning Point USA that surveils and “exposes” faculty for alleged discrimination of conservative students (Professor Watchlist, n.d.). They interviewed some faculty on the list and asked about its impact on their work. While some interviewees reported that their inclusion in Professor Watchlist was positive in the sense that they received support from their peers and institutions, they also noted concerns about its impact on academic freedom.
This all shows multi-layered tensions involved in the work. While researchers engage in important work, they also have to assess the potential risks of doing so against the risk of personal harm. The risk could ideally be mediated by institutions, yet, as Cooke and Sweeney specifically shared at the 2018 panel discussion, the response could either be delayed or lack an established protocol that provides an adequate level of protection, leaving the risk to be handled and experienced by the scholars themselves (Peet, 2018).
We experienced what we see as a fundamental tension between academic freedom and safety. That is, although we were granted academic freedom by our institutions, our work would be publicly available, so we were not necessarily guaranteed academic safety. Academic institutions, like many organizations, must also weigh risks and manage their public reputations. We grew concerned that threats to our reputation, institutional reputation and/or funding from external political forces could adversely impact our sense of academic freedom. These multilayered concerns stemmed from knowing how to identify threats to academic freedom but not enough about how to overcome these threats. To demystify the source of uncertainty, we consulted multiple members of our support network, beginning with the editorial team.
Editorial support
It takes a team to make an informed decision. Once we decided to situate our inquiry in the context of ongoing advocacy work in libraries, we needed to make sure our intention was aligned with the overall purpose and theme of the volume, “Data Literacy: Navigating the Shift from Hype to Reality (Chiewphasa, 2026). Additionally, Library Trends is published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (Hopkins Press, n.d.), and given the $800 million federal funding cuts the institution was facing in March 2025 (Daniels et al., 2025), we also felt the need to check in with our editor, Ben Chiewphasa. This led to honest and open dialogue about our reoriented research direction, as well as our concerns around the topic itself and our visibility, keywords, and the potential challenges to our work. These conversations helped us gain not only a sense of clarity but also support and being in community with other scholars.
Lessons learned
Throughout this experience, we learned lessons that we will carry forward and that we hope will make a meaningful contribution to conversations on academic freedom and safety for library workers and scholars.
Practical resources (and their limitations)
Having practical tools significantly reduces feelings of uncertainty and increases a sense of preparedness for potential threats. During the writing process for both the Library Trends article and this article, we discovered that some academic and non-academic institutions have provided practical guidelines to protect researchers’ safety.
In recognition of the common tactics of intimidation and harassment that some researchers face in their public-facing work, the Researcher Support Consortium created a series of resources to help researchers navigate potential risks and responses, and to equip them with coping strategies when attacked (Researcher Support Consortium, 2024b). The recommendations range from the removal of personal information on public websites, including institutional directories, to protecting online spaces with password requirements, and also preparing an organizational statement if necessary. The guide repeatedly emphasizes the importance of mitigating impact on one’s psychological well-being and physical safety, and recommends seeking out support in numbers and communicating with a support network. Along with these recommendations, the group also provides institutions with toolkits to protect and support their researchers, including a step-by-step guideline, a sample institutional policy, and certificates of confidentiality (Researcher Support Consortium, 2024a).
Several universities also provide researcher safety guidelines directly. The University of Colorado Boulder provides an extensive list of guidelines under Scholarship & Safety, including a checklist based on professional positionality (e.g., researcher, administrator) in the context of the event (Academic Affairs at the University of Colorado Boulder, n.d.). Similarly, York St. John University clearly addresses the term “researcher vulnerability” and provides institutional guidance on addressing physical and psychological vulnerabilities associated with research (York St. John University, n.d.). Both examples of institutional guidance include different types of risks associated with research, not only online harassment and physical harms but also the psychological aspects; this includes prolonged engagement with sensitive research topics and the potential to experience vicarious trauma.
While these documents provide a starting point for protecting oneself against potential attacks, they are few in number. The recommendations, while calling for institutional support, primarily ask individual researchers to take protective measures, thereby adding additional psychological and, at times, financial burden (such as subscribing to personal data removal services). Additionally, these guidelines may not cover all categories of scholars at an institution (e.g., PhD students, teaching faculty, staff scientists, academic librarians). We recognize the value of these tools and also acknowledge that they have limitations, and we suggest that institutions take steps to develop more comprehensive safety plans for all types of scholars.
Power of collaborative writing
One of the most important lessons we learned from writing about immigrants, data literacy, and surveillance in 2025 is that collaboration and care are critical to our decision-making process as well as our well-being as we work through our concerns. In addition to the typical challenges we expected when writing on our topic, we encountered new challenges through renewed anti-immigrant sentiments and threats to academic freedom. These issues impacted our psychological states more than we had initially anticipated. However, through our collaborative writing process and our weekly check-ins, we provided support for one another and worked through our concerns collectively and while critically interrogating the unfolding events. Exercising our library values and putting them into practice felt empowering and generative during a time that was otherwise demoralizing.
Additionally, we were grateful for the support we received from our editorial team. We were able to be open with them about our concerns and fears, and we had opportunities for low-stakes exploration of various options to minimize our exposure. We also received institutional support from our advisors and supervisors. These were key ingredients in our decision-making process, and we acknowledge that they were privileges not afforded to all academics and advocates writing in this space.
One of the most important aspects of our writing process was acknowledging the moment in history in the article itself. This helped ground us and provide context to our conversations about how to move forward with the article. Furthermore, it was a reminder that all articles are written under a particular context, whether stated or unstated, and we will consider including the social and political context in future articles we write.
Another lesson we learned, which is not a unique lesson but needs to be considered individually, was our decision on whether or not to use our real names and institutions in our publication. We had several discussions related to this issue, especially after one of us was targeted at work. Ultimately, we learned a lesson that other scholars may have already learned: we could either be completely anonymous or very visible.
Conclusion
We hope that sharing our experience and situating it in the wider context of academic freedom and intellectual freedom can contribute to discussions about the protections that library workers have (and lack) when exercising their freedoms. We felt that it was important to discuss not only the abstract, theoretical issues related to this topic, but also our lived experiences.
We are grateful to all of the scholars working on academic freedom, particularly the work of Leebaw and Logsdon (2020) and Nicole Cooke, Stacy Collins, Kristin Lansdown, Amy Koester, Dianae Foote, Emily Knox, Jamie Naidoo, and Aimee Strittmatter (Peet, 2019). One area of future research is to update the data on the state of academic freedom in libraries and for PhD students today given the rise in new union contracts that we found throughout our research. Ultimately, a more systematic approach to analyzing union contracts and institutional policies across libraries and doctoral programs will better prepare library workers and PhD students (and graduate students more broadly) to fight for the academic freedoms that protect faculty (while still recognizing its limitations).
One of the many inevitable consequences in writing about a topic that was personally and professionally challenging was that we experienced a range of emotions as we wrote: fear of being targeted, anger at the persecution of immigrants, and occasional moments of despair. We recognized the ways in which these emotions could lead to self-censorship and the watering down of the realities of that moment in history. This led to regular conversations about how we were framing current events and the urgency in our tone throughout the article, which needed to be balanced with practical suggestions for readers. This was a negotiation neither of us had experienced in writing an academic article, and our discussions were essential in determining our next steps, along with the support of our editor and peer reviewers.
Of course, we recognize that while powerful, writing is not a substitute for other actions. However, our writing partnership has helped us push against feelings of fear and fatalism, and it has been a way to connect with others who also care about these issues. We hope that readers are inspired to find community through writing and use it as one tool (even if a small tool) of resistance.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to our editor, Pam Lach, and our reviewers, Brea McQueen and Shawn(ta) Smith-Cruz, for their support in guiding us through this process. At a time when we are all experiencing pressures from many directions, their generosity, energy, and care is even more meaningful. This article is better having been shaped by their wisdom and thoughtfulness. We are also thankful for our partnership and to LIS scholars for motivating us to keep on writing.
References
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