The 2025 Early Career Researcher Award goes to Tina Liu for her paper “The Economics of Identity: How EDI Initiatives Treat Racialized Identities as Currency in Academic Libraries
Her paper stands out for the insightful and powerful way it draws into question certain truths librarians hold about ourselves and our institutions. The immediate positive attention that her paper has received and its incorporation into MLIS course work less than 6 months after its publication speak to its potential to have a serious, ongoing impact on the academic library profession.
The committee believes that her paper may well prove over time to be a foundational contribution to the literature on EDI in academic libraries. She is an impressively accomplished early career researcher, and her paper is an exceptional example of research in our profession.
Congratulations to Tina for her incredible work on this paper and this well-deserved award!
Bio: Tina Liu is a Cataloguing Librarian at McGill University. She has been the recipient of grants and scholarships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Canadian Association of Research Libraries, and was an ALA Spectrum Scholar. Her research interests include critical librarianship and critical cataloguing, contemporary digital documentation practices, and representations of diasporic and marginalized communities in library collections.
