We are pleased to announce that Dual MAS/MLIS student Isabel Carlin and MLIS student Hikaru Ikeda have been awarded two 2021 ALA Spectrum Scholarships by the American Library Association’s (ALA) Office for Diversity, Literacy and Outreach Services. This year, the jury awarded a total of 61 scholarships to exceptional students pursuing graduate degrees in library and information studies.
The Spectrum Scholarship Program is designed to address the specific issue of the under-representation of critically needed ethnic librarians within the profession while serving as a model for ways to bring attention to larger diversity issues in the future. Spectrum Scholars are selected based on their commitment to community building, leadership potential and planned contributions to making social justice part of everybody’s everyday work in LIS.
Since 1997, the ALA has awarded more than 1,300 Spectrum Scholarships. Through this program, the American Library Association affirms its commitment to diversity and inclusion by seeking the broadest participation of new generations of racially and ethnically diverse librarians to position ALA to provide leadership in the transformation of libraries and library services.
Congratulations Isabel and Hikaru!
For more information, please read the ALA’s official announcement.
About the winners
Isabel Carlin is a second-year MAS/MLIS student with a background in Indigenous Studies, French Studies, and History. Their research interests focus on Indigenous ways of knowing, sociological haunting, and political economy. Their proposed thesis work focuses on intergenerational recordkeeping practices in the northern Philippines.
Hikaru Ikeda is this year’s Rainbow Round Table Scholar and an entering MLIS student. Rooted in organizing at the intersections of racial, transgender and social justice, they are passionate about community-based and led libraries as sites of (un)knowing and collective practice in building justice from the ground up. Hikaru’s goals include fostering (culturally) safe, healing and reflexive information approaches and practices.
