daria
Daria is the Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK, leading programmes and advocacy for knowledge equity and information literacy. In that broad role she designs projects and partnerships for Knowledge Equity via bringing diverse people and content onto Wikimedia projects. She also shapes how Wikimedia UK can support a democratic and empowered society in the UK by developing information literacy skills.
Daria is a trustee at Global Dialogue, a platform for human rights philanthropy, and has recently been awarded a Churchill Fellowship in the Tech for All category, investigating Central Asia’s online civil society and its resilience responses to a shrinking civic space.
Session
I present research about information literacy skills which I conducted in 2023/24. As our work as Wikimedians and educators becomes more important (within a world of contested facts), it's important to reflect deeply how we talk about information literacy, and about those who we perceive as not engaging with factual information.
I investigated information literacy skills of conspiracy theories followers. It was an exploration of how emotion shows up in critical thinking, and how, if not included in information literacy education, it can derail the learning process, while also fuelling polarisation.
Are information literacy educators closer than we realise to a conspiracy theorists approach to engaging with information? What follows is a series of questions that aim to be an invitation for reflection on how information literacy and critical thinking is taught.