Strategic Foresight in Civic Engagement for Racial Justice

This paper briefly identifies qualitative themes from semi-structured feedback collected in online interviews/focus groups with forty public library staff in the American South about their foresight regarding library roles in civic engagement to promote racial justice. The research is timely in its engagement with stakeholders who are now directly impacted by the recent political and financial threats to federal funding and support of library-related agencies and assaults on public organizations that promote diversity and inclusion. Library staff provide potential directions of future engagement to support racial justice that spotlights their constructive role of resilience in response to these harsh political realities in the United States. Questions around the why’s, how’s, what’s, and specific actions integrated in data collection form a possible framework providing potential holistic structure of organization, content, representation, and delivery of civic engagement for racial justice in public library and communities to be developed further in future research.