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This conceptual paper identifies future directions for information practices theoretical discourses addressing marginality, community, and embodiment. We extend arguments from critical research identifying how existing discourses fail to capture the nuanced, lived experiences of people and communities confronting marginalization, predominantly via their reinforcement of deficit narratives. We then connect a series of qualitative projects examining the information practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual communities in the American South with relevant Library and Information Science (LIS) research to examine how marginality, community, and embodiment shape these practices. Specifically, we introduce a conceptual model that describes marginality by framing information practices as tactical and agentic responses to and refutations of social and structural barriers and risks. While some of the information practices of participants and communities appear to be uninformed or unsafe, they represent the products of community sharing and vetting. Embodied navigations further inform participant practices as they navigate information worlds produced and informed by their intersectional identities. These arguments coincide with key categories established within our model that describe information practices: defensive and protective, and community and self. Based on these insights, we offer directions for future research and theory to reorient existing discourses in ways that inspire middle‐range theory building that fully captures people's lived experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While there are calls for new paradigms within the profession, there are also existing subgenres that fit this bill if they would be fully acknowledged. This essay argues that underrepresented and otherwise marginalized scholars have already produced significant work within social, cultural, and community‐oriented paradigms; social justice and advocacy; and, diversity, equity, and inclusion. This work has not been sufficiently valued or promoted. Furthermore, the surrounding structural conditions have resulted in the dismissal, violently reviewed and rejected, and erased work of underrepresented scholars, and the stigmatization and delegitimization of their work. These scholars are "outsiders‐within‐LIS." By identifying the outsiders‐within‐LIS through the frame of standpoint theories, the authors are suggesting that a new paradigm does not need to be created; rather, an existing paradigm needs to be recognized and reprioritized. This reprioritized paradigm of critical sociocultural work has and will continue to creatively enrich and expand the field and decolonize LIS curricula. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how search engines and social‐networking sites enable and constrain the identity‐related information practices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) millennials in the United States. I employ affordances as a process concept to understand the recursive relationship between individuals and technologies and envision information practices as an outcome of this relationship. Guided by this conceptual framework, I conducted 30 semistructured interviews with LGBTQ+ individuals between the ages of 18 and 38. Data analysis identified 3 key affordances that enable and constrain participants' information practices: visibility, anonymity, and association. The findings indicate that participants are highly skilled in appropriating technological features to engage in desired information practices, such as seeking and creating. However, they also must contend with significant sociocultural barriers encoded into these features, which reinforce hetero‐ and cisnormative identity discourses. Library practitioners and systems designers can use these findings to offer services and systems inclusive of LGBTQ+ populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]