Book Banning in 21st-Century America
Product details
- ISBN 9781538195062
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 08 Jan 2026
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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With book banning increasing around America, this book breaks down how and why contemporary reading practices can lead to censorship.
Requests for the redaction, removal, relocation, and restriction of books—also known as challenges—have markedly increased in the 2020s. Book Banning in 21st-Century American Libraries, based on 25 contemporary book challenge cases in schools and public libraries across the United States argues that understanding contemporary reading practices, especially interpretive strategies, is vital to understanding why people attempt to censor books in public institutions.
The books focuses on the why of censorship and posits that many censorship behaviors and practices, such as challenging books and targeting public libraries and schools, are intimately tied to the how one understands the practice of reading and its effects on character development and behavior. It discusses reading as a social practice that has changed over time and encompasses different physical modalities and interpretive strategies. In order to understand why people challenge books, it presents a model of how the practice of reading is understood by challengers including “what it means” to read a text, and especially how one constructs the idea of “appropriate” reading materials.
Emily Knox is a professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship, information ethics and policy, and the intersection of print culture and reading practices. She is also a member of the Mapping Information Access research team.
Her book, Book Banning in 21st Century America (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015) is the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars’ Series. Her most recent book Foundations of Intellectual Freedom won the 2023 Eli M. Oboler Prize for best published work in the area of intellectual freedom. Emily’s articles have been published in the Library Quarterly, Library and Information Science Research, and Open Information Science. Emily serves on the board of National Coalition Against Censorship and is the editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy.
