Intersectional Information Work Practices: Surfacing Care amidst COVID-19

This paper brings together and enriches the heretofore dispersed literature on information work and information practices. It does so under the auspices of Critical Race Theory (CRT), specifically intersectionality, and care work. Using the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States as the context for an exploratory, qualitative case study, we propose the concept of intersectional information work practices (IIWP) to denote the cluster of information-centric tasks in which Black women carers engaged. Seeking, scanning, searching, monitoring, finding, receiving, retrieving, using, and sharing information-Black women carers performed each of these IIWPs in dealing with health care providers, tests, illness and treatment, wellness, logistics, and avoiding misinformation. An IIWP lens sheds light on the too often invisible labor of Black women carers. Such a lens also brings into high relief the importance of scrutinizing power and (in)equity, race, gender, and class in exploring foundational Information Science concepts.